“Puree a few of the locals”

62. The Missing – Sarah Langan

Field trip! To bring back a plague to make everyone in town super creepy, apparently. I read The Missing several years ago, but like many books where some rather uncontrollable contagion shows up and people turn on each other it’s awfully familiar sounding in 2021 as a bad omen sort of story. If you want to watch the deterioration of society, there is the current reality shitshow, or there’s fiction. The Missing is connected to Langan’s previous novel The Keeper and expands the destruction to a community level, like viruses like to do.

Langan always includes environmental details that take the scariness beyond “oh no someone’s getting infected” and that makes the world building better; at the same time, it’s not quite as tight as The Keeper and doesn’t really have an explanation besides basically “ancient evil.” And really, we can have contemporary evil or ancient evil without explanations, but I’ll take a good research scene that gives some solid answers over family drama in these stories any day. Although to be fair, “not as tight as The Keeper” does not mean it’s not good reading.

“There’s a Corpus Christi, Maine?” – Salem. “Apparently.” – Hen Wen.