by Chuck Wendig
I haven’t read any Chuck Wendig novels before although the author’s name was familiar to me although I am not sure why that would be. Maybe it’s a Gen X thing – we recognize each other in the wild. Or maybe it’s because they haunt the same social media space that I do – although with a far bigger following then I do of course. But when this book showed up on NetGalley I requested it right away without knowing anything beyond the name was familiar and the blurb sounded interesting .
I’m not going to lie I was expecting a fantasy novel whatever that means. Demons and magic and a heroic protagonist, I suppose. But as I read I thought, well, this is a horror novel more than anything else. i’ve read my fair share of horror novels in my life, a fair number of Stephen King, both good and bad, some Clive Barker, some more esoteric gothic works but I haven’t picked up anything in the genre in the last few years, other than Ava Reid’s Innamorata ( which was more of tribute to Mervyn Peake’s gothic fantasy) and Grady Hendrix which i hear is controversial but I love his 80s vibe. There are a few other fantasy horror hybrids that I’ve read recently that do a good job of straddling the line between the genres (Leigh Bardugo, Alix Harrow), but The Calamities seems to lean far more into horror. This is in the back of mind as I was reading.
Mourning Mayne, one of the main protagonists in this novel is what I expect in a horror novel protagonist. Caught in the nightmare of their life, on the precipice of being the villain or the hero of the novel. The characters are grotesque, violent human beings. The reader is not supposed to root for any of the main characters but they are lovable in their own messed up ways. Side characters are grotesque, like the billionaire manosphere influencer who believes in his own bullshit. described as a looking “like a groyper chad chode”. The writing and the inside cultural jokes added an element that says this world of billionaire demonic forces that work behind the scenes is not as unbelievable when we think about the what is actually out there. There are so many real details, like the Gen X in me appreciates the X-files conspiracist in the Mudhoney Tshirt, that when Wendig goes on to describe the places where the ley lines are strong, or the veil between worlds is thin, it seems real and present.
The final scenes are full of visceral horror one expects in a novel such as this. Demonic, indescribable creatures Dead bodies and parts Liminal abandoned places – perhaps the most horror adjacent being the empty missile silo, next to the unending corn fields. All of these scenes from our earliest nightmares that just don’t feel right in our world.
As to why fantasy and not horror? I recommend reading Wendig’s acknowledgments after the book where he talks about the genre and the space fantasy and horror occupy in genre fiction. Once upon a time, there was only speculative fiction, some of it in space, some of it among knights and dragons, some pretty elves and some horror eldritch things. Over the years we’ve decamped to our own corners of genre and said, well, this is not fantasy, it’s a war/ horror story with dark elements. But as Wendig points out ” It’s literature. Shit gets weird in literary spaces” and he’s right and it doesn’t matter what this is, it’s just good literature.
