It’s creating a buzz
Synopsis
Ash is stranded at a rural horror film festival about a giant killer cicada and can’t decide what’s worse, the movie or her idiot boyfriend, until she realizes she’s starring in the bloody sequel when people start dying and the locals won’t let them leave.
Review
Now this is how you do a creature feature. Tanya Pell has worked out the golden rule of such thrill rides, which is yes, the creatures must be brilliantly conceived, and yes, there must be oodles of pleasing violence and mayhem—but it must be rooted around an iconic main character who, even before the creatures attack, is down on their luck in a way the audience can immediately emphasise with.
In the glorious Ash we have exactly such a star. From the moment we meet Ash – stuck on a hot highway on an ill-conceived vacation with her irredeemable scumbag of a boyfriend – we are pushed face first into her cocktail of frustration, sarcasm and rage (punctuated by flirtation with a potential alternate romance, of course, another staple of the creature feature) which eventually explodes into a glorious cascade of violence. It can’t be a coincidence that Ash shares a name with a chainsaw-wielding horror icon, because although she doesn’t get her hands on that buzzy instrument of carnage she certainly makes her way through a fair variety of other gore-inducing implements of badassery.
Before we get the violence though we get the simmering tension, as Ash and her aforementioned awful example of manhood find themselves waylaid in a strange town, the firmly tongue-in-cheek named Revelation, which is hosting a film screening of a horror film about giant cicadas, bizarrely shown on old VHS. The townsfolk seem a little too friendly, and something is afoot in the woods, and for the first half Pell crafts the sense of “you should probably get the hell out of here” into knife-like tension, punctuated by the phenomenal frustration we feel on Ash’s behalf at being lumped with possibly the worst vacation partner you could ever conceive of.
But it’s when the true nature of the film screening becomes evident that the sheer thousand-mile-an-hour force of Pell’s vivid, well-crafted prose takes off as Ash turns into a one woman army, channeling all her rage into an unstoppable whirlwind of violence taking on all comers, whether people or monsters.
Speaking of the monster, I don’t think I’m going to be shot for the crime of spoiler if I say that it might be related to the title and what’s on those creepy videos, but Pell still manages to surprise with the true nature of the beast, complete with detailed description of its truly awful body (its head design reminded me of Jeepers Creepers in one particular detail) and genuinely upsetting (in the best way) close descriptions of its kills. Its method of killing too, is just vile and makes being mauled by an over-caffeinated Bengal tiger seem like a great way to go. It’s thanks to Pell’s confident prose, florid and playful in all the most violent detail, that these death scenes and descriptions are so damn memorable.
By the end, we are firmly ensconced on Ash’s one-woman exorcism of all her frustrations through over-the-top violence, and both her and we the reader feel cleansed, albeit a little bit nauseous as well.
Overall, with simmering tension followed by nauseating kills and a heroine that makes Ellen Ripley seem meek, Tanya Pell has taken the creature feature blueprint and gone nuclear with it. Wildly fun – another Shortwave hit.
Cicada by Tanya Pell releases on September 24th from Shortwave Media.
Preorder and support Shortwave directly, here
See what fellow FearForAll reviewer Anna Dupre had to say here
Also (guess this book is popular) see what fellow FearForAll reviewer Sean had to say here
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