The Nest, by Gregory A. Douglas

The head was a stark bloodstained bowl of death lying accusingly on blood-red leaves. It was the ghastly centerpiece of the unholy feast... the gaping skull seemed to be beseeching heaven for help, for justice, for reprieve from this vandalization of everything human.

I always try to read some horror in October--my sister and I always exchange horror novels/short story collections, too--and this year I kicked things off with this gloriously overwrought novel about carnivorous mutant cockroaches on a New England island. They grow up to six inches long and have highly developed jaws, chewing their victims until even their bones are dust! They've formed a colony with its own kind of malign intelligence! And they're here to eat everything in sight, including an adorable dog and an entire Sunday school class's worth of children. (I was personally more upset by the dog. His name was Sharky, because he'd bravely faced down a shark once before, and I loved him.) You kind of have to admire the full-throttle commitment the author shows to cockroaches eating people, but it doesn't stop there! You also get a shipwreck! And rats, maddened by the cockroaches eating them, also eat some people! Now that's value for your money.

I'm being glib, but honestly, this book is kind of a delight. I usually prefer lower-key horror, but if you're going to go with trashy setups and purple prose, let's go full trash and full purple:

The insects were insatiable over the bodies. The bugs were red with human blood. Their shells gleamed in the lightning flashes with the slime of their destruction. To the funereal pounding of the waves rising higher on the shore, lightning kept disclosing more and more horror--lacerated flesh, severed limbs, a child's head rolling to the water's edge, being lifted by a wave and carried ghoulishly away.
Pieces and flakes of skeletons were floating on the sea now. The shore was a viscid spread of inert refuse, a roach-turbulent repository of misery beyond agony.
There was no way for a mind to encompass the atrocity. It was the excrescence of Nature gone evil. Evil beyond barbarism, beyond cruelty. It was deed beyond excoriation, curse or damnation. It was Damnation itself.
It was an apocalypse of Nature's mindless enormity, and Reed Brockshaw's own Gethsemane.
Fish would feed on strange fruit this day.
Reed Brockshaw gnashed his teeth and wailed.

Reed Brockshaw also supplied the book with the immortal line: "DAMN THE ROACHES! MY KIDS ARE ON THAT BOAT!"

Anyway, mutant cockroaches have developed in the dump on Yarkie, a New England enclave that is morally superior to every other part of the country, something you know because neither the characters nor the author will shut up about it, including a ham-handed interjection later about how part of the greatness of Yarkie stems from their unwillingness to take government handouts. Okay. (I mean, the giant cockroaches can only be battled back by the Harvard scientists who were willing to drop everything and come help you because one of your own married a GASP LIBERAL ACADEMIC, but okay.) Yarkie is populated by: drunk vacationers, sweet vacationers, itinerant young men of ill-repute who SMOKE MARIJUANA (which in the world of The Nest makes you hallucinate that you're a fish), and salt-of-the-earth locals with sailor-boy hearts of oak.

The novel mostly focuses on Elizabeth, a kind of half-resident--her grandfather is a Yarkie stalwart and she's a "traditionalist" like him--who is a college junior visiting for the summer with her friend Bonnie, who is a sweetheart of a girl--so nice, in fact, that Yarkie doesn't even care that she's black. They were nervous when she first showed up, but it turned out okay! (Obviously the novel's treatment of Bonnie is a serious mixed bag, but I should note that she is, in fact, a reasonably well-done, heroic character, and she does survive the book.) There are also two Harvard scientists--one of whom is male and heroic and brilliant and the other of whom is female and heroic and brilliant (and excessively beautiful and Tragic because She Has Trouble Connecting to Men, so--the adventures of the mixed bag characterization continues). The men fight mutant cockroaches. The women mostly pitch in by cooking and cleaning for the men, though at least Wanda, the scientist, gets to have a heroic death saving Peter, her male counterpart, and also gets to have Elizabeth reflect on how everyone should listen to Wanda because Wanda's obviously brilliant. Peter/Elizabeth happens, but I ship Elizabeth/Bonnie and Elizabeth/Wanda and everyone/getting the fuck off Yarkie, seriously, why are you waiting so long to evacuate, there are fucking mutant roaches everywhere, this is not the time to dreamily reflect on the landscape.

The roaches are suitably terrifying, though you do hit a point of diminishing returns after a while: you can only read so many times about them eating their way through eyes and squirming up people's asses and tunneling into their brains. Their routine is pretty much the same every time. When the rats bother to eat someone, they also follow the same step-by-step process, down to their "raping noses." (Ewwww.)

Anyway, this is not a good novel, but it is a hell of a lot of fun, especially if you like doing dramatic readings in a deep voice. And for all the flaws in terms of how the novel treats gender and race and social progress generally, it's an oddly nice book where the characters all spend a lot of time being impressed by each other and admiring each other. Maybe Douglas thought we'd need some cuddliness to balance out scenes where a young girl and her brother are devoured by cockroaches or where a man gets eaten dick first because he fell, landed partly in a snake burrow, and began to fuck it.

Actually, no, no one needs any distraction from that last part. That last part's amazing.