What I’m Reading: THE BLEAK DECEMBER by Kevin Summers

I got a very Stephen King vibe from The Bleak December, the latest installment from the crew at APOCALYPSE WEIRD. You know what I’m talking about: small New England town, creepy goings-on, and ordinary people being twisted by extraordinary, supernatural circumstances.

One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about the APOCALYPSE WEIRD collection is the variety. Each author is given full rein to create their own cast of ne’er-do-wells and weirdness, and Summers does it like a master. He stitches together a series of character vignettes about the ordinary people who inhabit Stratford Corners, New Hampshire. People like Barbara Campbell, who has returned to Stratford Corners after a nasty divorce, or her son, Wesley, who has to spend his senior year in an unfriendly high school. There’s Big John Christie, the one and only cop in this speck of a mountain town, and Harlan Nash, an Iraq War vet home to see his folks and get some space from his wife.

Like King, all of Summers' characters are basically decent people—not perfect, but they’re trying—and they all come with a heavy load of personal baggage that occupies their minds…until things go to Hell in the proverbial handbasket. As you read about these regular folks, you see your Aunt Mabel or your neighbor in them, and you also nurse this growing horror that some—maybe all—of them are going to bite it hard pretty early in the game.

Spoiler alert: they do.

What I really enjoyed about Summers’ writing was his sense of place. The little speech details, like “wicked” and “ayuh,” were spot on for that part of the country. The air of small town small-minded/big-hearted-ness of the people (think about it, you know what I mean) was the kind of artistic seasoning that made this book sing.

Some of the AW novels can get pretty bloody, but Summers went for horror rather than gore. One small example is that when people are killed in Stratford Corners, they come back to life as wights, a creature sort of like a Game of Thrones snow zombie, to prey on the living. In one phenomenally creepy scene, a few of the survivors are going house to house looking for food. They come upon a woman who has hung herself…and she wakes up and starts talking to them.

From one flatlander to another, The Bleak December, Apocalypse Weird #12, is well worth your time.

David Bruns is the creator of the sci-fi series The Dream Guild Chronicles, one half of the Two Navy Guys and a Novel blog series about co-writing a military thriller, and co-author of Weapons of Mass Deception, a story of modern-day nuclear terrorism.