Synopsis
“Mesmerizing, with a quiet but profound sense of dread” — Rachel Harrison, USA Today Bestselling author of Play Nice and So Thirsty
“The Denizens destroys you from the get-go, then has the audacity to resuscitate you with a simple flip of the page. LaFaro has the uncanny knack to equally decimate and resurrect his readers, chapter after chapter, a grief-stricken Prometheus, weighing his writing down with an ache that just keeps us coming back for more.” — Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
“The Denizens is a gripping, yet somber apocalyptic novel filled with the occult, the roaming dead, and disparate relationships mended and strained.” — Ai Jiang, author of Linghun and A Palace Near The Wind
“Brennan LaFaro builds dread with the best of them, and The Denizens is a creeping and macabre passage through grief and regret, terror and devotion, hope and pain. What lurks on the outskirts of Maylene’s Hollow will come for you no matter how prepared you think you might be.” — Christa Carmen, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Daughters of Block Island and How to Fake a Haunting
“Brennan LaFaro delivers a haunting Southern Gothic where grief, small-town secrets, and ancient horrors converge. In Maylene’s Hollow, the living and the damned walk side by side—and once you enter, the denizens never let you leave. Exceptionally terrifying!” — Cynthia Pelayo, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Shoemaker’s Magician
Just because it’s dead doesn’t mean it’s allowed to rest…
A small southern town surrounded by a living cemetery was the last place Sam Everett expected to find himself after the sudden death of his wife. Desperate to get away from the city and its memories, Sam flees to the tight-knit community of Maylene’s Hollow.
Except the Hollow holds a secret. The town won’t allow its dead to rest. Forced to wander the earth for hundreds of years, the denizens of the woods have had enough.
With the help of a mysterious widow who may also be a murderer, the town’s matriarch who seems to possess magical abilities, and an ornery giant who believes the dead may be right to rebel, Sam must learn to let go of the dead in order to truly live.
Review
After losing his wife to an illness, grieving pharmacist Sam is left reeling and a mistake at work has left him unemployed. Not knowing what else to do, he leaves town, retreating to the tiny community of Maylene’s Hollow where he’s secured a new job at Fagin’s Pharmacy. Maylene’s Hollow is a one-horse town, a deep Georgia version of Mayberry where everybody knows everyone else and all their business to boot.
The only thing keeping it from being Mayberry-proper is the simple fact that this forested enclave is teeming with the living dead. Those who pass in Maylene’s Hollow are left to the woods, where they spend their afterlife wandering aimlessly.
Maylene’s Hollow has the same problem as Gotham City, which is why would anybody in their right mind would live there? The townsfolk consider the zombies wandering the woods to be little more than just local wildlife. You got your deer, your squirrels, undead Confederate soldiers, and you’re recently departed mom and pop. The locals call them the denizens, and the denizens are mostly peaceable and keep to themselves. Until they don’t.
Anybody who’s seen literally any zombie movie at all can guess where Brennan LaFaro’s latest is headed, except for the citizens of Maylene’s Hollow who have indeed seen zombie movies but still don’t know any better. But half the fun, as they say, is getting there. It’s the journey, not the destination. Along the way, LaFaro smartly mixes genres, and while the addition of some witchy women and historic folklore doesn’t exactly give new life to the zombie schtick it does at least provide a certain amount of freshness to the proceedings.
A good zombie story isn’t really about the zombies anyway. The flesh-chomping and brain-bashing are nice side dishes, but they don’t make for a proper meal on their own. Zombies work best when they’re a metaphor for something else, like the unbridled, mindless consumerism of Dawn of the Dead. LaFaro suffuses The Denizens with plenty of themes, challenging the wisdom of continuing customs simply because that’s just the way it’s always been done, and of one’s identity being defined by familial legacies, which makes the people of Maylene’s Hollow just as trapped as the zombies encircling their little home. Why do people live in Maylene’s Hollow at all? Because, for so many of them, it’s all they’ve ever known. Like the folks in Gotham, all this madness is normal to them.
The real core of The Denizens, though, is its focus on loss. Sam is bitterly heartbroken, his life in disarray, and LaFaro intimately explores this throughout the work. Its opening chapter offers a concise look at Sam and Nellie’s marriage, even as it’s ending. It’s brief but tells us everything we need to know through intimation rather than grisly forensics, and is no less tragic for it. Even though we never see their marriage proper, we get a clear, heartfelt idea of what these two were like as a couple. Sam continually talks to Nellie as he works through his grief, and we get a good sense of what their lives might have been like in better times.
His new boss, Alice Fagin, posits a marriage at the complete opposite end. Her husband has recently died and been consigned to the woods, and she’s none too displeased at his passing. After all, she killed him, as she’s quick – eager even – to confess, and is a woman liberated by his demise. His death might be the best thing that’s ever happened to her, and she’s been reborn with a newfound freedom.
Loss and rebirth, that’s zombies in a nutshell. Or maybe that’s just life. Sam and Alice are seeking ways to make their own second chances with their new leases on life in the wake of tragedy, or at least happenstance. Forget the zombies and magic whatsits, it’s the human heart beating at the center of The Denizens that really makes it worthwhile. LaFaro crafts a great, relatable drama. The climactic last stand against rampaging hordes of zombies? That’s just a nice bonus.
Leave a Reply