Invasive Species by Karle JohnsonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Reminiscent of Stephen King and Joe Hill, this werewolf thriller has plenty of gore to satisfy a craving for blood and guts. It starts with a particularly gruesome scene and doesn't let up.
Ranse Everly is an inherited ranch owner in the Arkansas Ozarks besieged by townies, an utterly insane racist, and . . . werewolves. He's a recovering alcoholic, and when he was a drunk, his wife left him and took his Down's syndrome son with him. But now she's come back into his life and dumped his son on him, along with her cancer diagnosis. When she disappears shortly thereafter, Ranse is suspected of foul play. That and the racist's wife sleeping around, and his reaction to discovering it, is pretty much all the character development that is there, but all that's required for an action-packed gore-fest.
It starts with a series of maulings of humans and animals at one full moon, followed up by an all-out assault on the town at the other. The werewolfism is spread through some kind of blood-born contagion, for which little detail is given, which is fine by me. The novel is consistent in its treatment of the werewolves and how they spread.
It starts strong, with the death of a ranch hand, and finishes stronger with a climatic scene that is vivid and lasting. I found me asking myself, who of all these people are going to survive? And then . . . how are they going to survive?
I had a real problem with the editing. This novel deserved better editing than it got, and the errors were hard to ignore, though for some reason I noticed most of the errors in the first half.
Overall, if you like action and gore, you're going to like this novel.
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