Customer Reviews

The Missing

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The Missing is Sarah Langan's second novel, a follow up to her highly praised 2006 debut, The Keeper, which no less a light than Peter Straub described as combining "a genuinely poetic sensibility with a taste for horror's most bravura excesses." Happily, The Missing (called The Virus in its UK incarnation) shows those same qualities, resulting in a book that's memorable, heartbreaking and disturbing.

The Missing (inspired in part by Langan's personal experiences in New York in the days after the 9/11 attack, when the smells and dust emanating from ground zero permeated the air in the city) is a loose sequel to The Keeper. For instance, a character from that novel appears briefly, and the town of Bedford, where The Keeper was set, is mentioned. The key link between the two novels, however, is the explosion of Clott Paper Mill at the end of The Keeper.

Besides killing several people, the explosion and subsequent fire resulted in the release of deadly Hydrogen Sulfide gas into the air. That element comes to permeate the soil in the woods between Bedford and Corpus Christi, Maine, enabling a virus in the soil there to evolve into something deadly and malevolent, thus setting the stage for the events described in The Missing.

Langan's fictional horror is precipitated by, of all things, a fourth grade field trip, where a student gets lost. After being exposed to the virus, that student becomes a Typhoid Mary of sorts, spreading the virus by attacking and biting members of the local populace. Soon, the majority of the citizens of Corpus Christi are seized by madness, turning into aggressive, flesh-craving crazies, all intent on securing their next meal and spreading the virus to new hosts. They are led by the pregnant teacher, wallflower Lois Larkin, who, while searching for her student, felt compelled to ingest some of the tainted forest dirt. Due to the way she is introduced to the virus, she becomes the hub of the group mind that the virus fosters in its victims, coming to lead the infected against the remaining populace.

The Missing effectively combines small town horror with apocalyptic fiction, calling to mind several books and at least one film exploiting similar themes--King's Cell, Straub's Floating Dragon, and John Shirley's In Darkness Waiting are the novels, 28 Days Later the film--as people try to cope with a rapidly changing, infinitely more deadly world than the one they've become accustomed to. The two novels it consciously or unconsciously evokes most, however, are two classics, David Morrell's The Totem, and Chet Williamson's Ash Wednesday, the first because its posits a chillingly plausible explanation behind the legends of the werewolf, vampire and zombie, the second because, like Williamson, Langan knows that apocalypse is personal, choosing to generate emotional force from the trials and tribulations of a small cast of characters, rather than choosing a larger, global stage. Through thoroughly arresting prose, Langan creates an air of intimacy between her cast and her readers that she exploits to its fullest, demonstrating that small, everyday horrors--a friend's betrayal, a spouse's infidelity, the breakdown of a family unit, and the difficult choices daily life forces on us--can be more devastating to some than the literal end of the world.

Reading this novel should prove reassuring to horror's old(er) guard--although elements of the book will certainly feel familiar, it's not a mere rehash of prior works. Rather, it is a statement that it's perfectly legitimate to revisit what's come before, as long as writers come at the material from a slightly different angle, with a slightly different perspective. The old saw that "there are no new stories, only new ways of telling them" once again holds true, at once a concession to reality and a creative challenge. It's invigorating to see new talent like Langan handling that challenge so deftly.

A field trip leads to the awakening....

Despite the decimation from a fire in Bedford, the school board approves teacher Lois Larkin to take her fourth grade class on a field trip to the site. Lois is heartbroken over her the breakup of her engagement to Ronnie Koehler, so heartbroken that she doesn't notice when one of her students goes missing. The search is on for James Walker, but it is too late as he has awakened something, something dark and hungry that has only been biding its time in Bedford. Will anyone survive as this vicious plague spreads?

I almost didn't finish THE MISSING. Why in the world would a school board approve a field trip to a place like Bedford? The descriptions were positively terrifying, as Sarah Langan does an excellent job at building a suspenseful and horrifying atmosphere. But I couldn't grasp why a school board would say Lois could take her students to a place where birds would drop dead in mid flight and trees shriveled up and died.

I also struggled with Lois' character. Her sniffling over Ronnie should have been at least sad, but instead I found myself irritated by her refusal to develop a backbone or to reach out to the opportunities available to her. Lois initially seems as if she is determined to fail. However, Sarah Langan has some surprises in store for the reader as Lois is going to be a doormat no longer.

THE MISSING progresses into a decent horror novel once the story kicks in. The town of Corpus Christi, Maine, is about to know the true meaning of horror as the residents will have to face the horrendous consequences of this plague. In the midst of this devastation, several individuals struggle to survive. Readers will find themselves drawn into the subplots featuring Maddie Wintrob and her family, along with that of the Walker family and Danny Walker, as they are caught in this apocalyptic nightmare. Will they survive? Or is everyone doomed to die? Only the turn of the page will reveal what happens....

COURTESY OF CK2S KWIPS AND KRITIQUES

There are a few good blurbs in and on this book that interested me from a few good writers that interest me so I bought it (or rather, I Mooched it) and I read it. It was a pretty quick read and I have to say, it was quick because I didn't like it very much.

The story is pretty good. The characterizations are pretty bad. I felt like the author was trying to create internally tormented characters but the resulting characterizations were shallowly annoying and instead of coming across tormented to this reader, they came off the pages as ridiculously vacillating. Example: The main character, or family actually, was so full of conflicting emotions and mental attitudes toward each other that I started doubting if the author even realized what they were up to. Feelings toward other family members and "loved ones" flipped between love, hate, complete passion and absolute displeasure... all within the space of a paragraph... over and over and over. It was annoying and my suspension of reality (a necessary request by an author of any reader) was tested to the limits.

The book left me feeling like there was definitely something "Missing." What was missing was any kind of coherency. Don't get me wrong, I understand incoherent emotions and how they can play a role in a good story. There is nothing better than an incoherent person to add drama and suspense and even emotion (in the reader, either disdain or pity or even pleasure at such out-there thinking and actions) but when your main characters vacillate between such extremes it gets to be a big distraction.

I love my wife, I hate my wife, I love my husband, I hate my husband, I love my parents, I hate my parents, I love our life, I hate our life, I'm a good person, I'm evil, I hate everything, I love everything. This is how the book reads. Passion, either good or evil, is a great attribute. Trying to impose both at the same time can make for great and tormented characters delving into a slip of sanity. Or, it can make for a miserable roller coaster ride that detracts from the overall story. The latter is what we have here.

Never mind the fact that the premise of the book lies just past the reach of suspended reality to which readers are asked to submit. In this case, a teacher (another tormented, I hate/I love character) is given permission in upscale community of Corpus Christi, ME to take children on a field trip to a decimated, diseased, burned, polluted and dying neighboring town called Bedford (this was too convenient and I would propose would never have been allowed in the first place, thus my suspension of reality was tested early) where an evil is released by an annoying little schoolboy with a Jeffery Dahmer childhood. Never mind that, and the characterizations, and the book is still, well... pretty bad.

-=R=-

Langan has the ability to create a fully-realized, three-dimensional person in only a few short pages. Near the beginning of THE MISSING, a woman walks out of her house to pick up the newspaper. On her way back, she sees a bird eating poisonous berries. If a lesser author were to write this sequence, it would be half a page and we would know no more about this woman when she returned to the house than we did at the beginning of the chapter.

With Langan behind the wheel, this ordinary moment is a glimpse into a life both complex and ordinary, a woman frustrated in her role as mother and wife, full of regret and hope and sadness all at once. She is a real person, someone we know or might even have been, and we suddenly care very much what happens to her.

This is where most horror movies and many novels fail: making characters into archetypes, easily disposed of when the monster appears. Langan never falls into stereotype, making each character nuanced and real, with flaws that remind us that they are human beings. We never cheer for any of the deaths, even when they are characters we wouldn't want to know in real life. But we feel real sorrow at their flailing and ultimate futile attempts to save themselves.

Langan's voice will echo in your head for days after you finish reading this book. I find myself eagerly awaiting her next outing, even if the path down which she leads us is lined with poisonous flowers.

[...]

What started out as an innocent field trip to the woods in the neighboring town of Bedford turned into a nightmare for the inhabitants of Corpus Christi, Maine. Lois Larkin, grade school teacher beloved by most everyone in the small affluent town was troubled by a broken heart and broken dreams, or maybe she would have thought better of the ill fated trip.

A disturbed young boy awakens an evil hiding in the woods. A malicious evil waiting to spread and an unsuspecting town is its breeding ground. But Corpus Christi is just the beginning.

Sarah Langan proves with her second thrilling novel that she's no fluke. THE MISSING is an intellectual scare-fest that will have you pondering the survival of mankind. More than just an apocalyptic tale, we follow patient zero and the newly infected on a path of ideological malevolence and those who are fighting to survive it. These aren't mindless vampires or zombies and that's one thing that makes it so disturbing. The people infected keep a part of themselves as they are driven insane and given a new purpose.

As with THE KEEPER, Langan's debut novel, I found myself more horrified by my own imagination as she allowed the reader to let the circumstances play out. I enjoyed being given the benefit of letting the disturbing events unfold without having the details ruined by verbosity. That's not to say that she doesn't paint a vivid picture of the circumstances and rich characters with a spellbinding and gruesome brush. That kind of talent is a valuable commodity and shows a maturity that's exciting in a new writer.

The supporting characters are ones we are familiar with. The wife struggling to overcome her infidelity, the psychologist trying to save one more patient, the teenager trying to find love and acceptance, the little boy who doesn't understand why he does bad things. It's what gives us resonance with the characters as they struggle though the horrific circumstances we are too afraid to imagine.

It's not necessary to read THE KEEPER to enjoy THE MISSING, but you will be rewarded with creepy details if you don't deny yourself the pleasure. While THE KEEPER made me sleep with the lights on, THE MISSING had me bolting my doors and checking my windows.

COURTESY OF CK2S KWIPS AND KRITIQUES

Often, readers of horror novels are fooled into buying a new author's book by the screaming blurb on the cover telling us that THIS author is the "new Stephen King/Clive Barker/Peter Straub" etc. Or, they will read reviews telling them the same thing on websites like Amazon or other outlets. Yes, these authors are amazing and new scribes, I'm sure, are extremely flattered by these comparisons, but then comes someone like Sarah Langan, and all comparisons should really be stopped. With The Missing, Sarah Langan has created a novel that is entirely unique. Without compromising the visceral horror that one should expect from an apocalyptic tale such as this, the reader is still lulled into a state of grace by the sheer poetry of Langan's vivid language. Visceral, scary, gruesome, heartbreaking, bleak and, ultimately terrifying, The Missing is the sort of horror novel that only comes around once in a great while. Soon, I am sure, other authors will be overjoyed to have their works compared to this amazing woman. Behold Sarah Langan, a new master of horror.

I haven't been this excited about a new writer since I picked up Carrie in 1974. From her first book, The Keeper, Ms. Langan established the haunted communities surrounding the town of Bedford, Maine in her new book, The Missing. You won't hear Jimmy Stewart running down the streets with his arms spread out and saying, "I love you Bedford Falls." I couldn't take a moment to stop reading this book. Folks, it just that good. Langan is the real deal when it comes to this genre. But don't let the "horror" tag fool you, this book will appeal to even the harshest naysayers. The story that chronicles these well-developed characters keeps the narrative real. This has always been a gripe of mine that horror stories, though the basis of every horror story is that "it can't happen," lose interest when you don't believe in the characters enough to share in their growing sense of the horror that surrounds them. Langan keeps you grounded. Stephen King's first book was about an angry girl, as was the character in the Keeper. His second book, 'Salem's Lot, engrossed us in the inhabitants of a slowly dying small town, much like The Missing. Can it be that Ms. Langan's next book will be about a haunted structure! I already can't even wait for the next one. Do yourself a favor, click on the ADD TO SHOPPING CART tab at the top of the page and you'll be glad you did.

About a year ago I read, and reviewed (in an Amazon blurb), "The Keeper," by Sarah Langan. For me, that book was a mixed bag. The story struck me as uneven, as if Langan were trying to resurrect the great 70s / 80s horror novels of King and Straub. I applauded the effort, but the flow seemed off or forced or imitative. I don't know. Something didn't click all the way. But despite that overall impression, what stood out, equally, were the writer's strengths: well-developed characters, believable dialogue, and really good descriptive writing. Langan knows contemporary small town America and the folks that inhabit those towns (and suburbs) every bit as good as Stephen King. There are popular writers today who have not yet mastered character development, dialogue, and descriptive writing. The fact that Langan had these skills in pocket already, and with her first novel, to my mind stamped her as a writer potentially on the verge.

Now comes her second novel, "The Missing." There have been any number of End-of-the-World books and movies, many of them quite good. I suppose one could start with "Revelation," but recent horror story memory might label Richard Matheson's "I Am Legend,"as one the most influential and best (and closest to Langan's effort here), but there are so many books and movies that to start ticking them off would be an endless exercise for a short review. Still, the End of the World book or flick popularity continues to this day, because like no other type of story, such efforts hit at the heart of what frightens us most Now. In the last few years (Post 9/11) there have been outstanding, if dark, efforts to match the headlines we seem to face daily. In Cinema, "28 Days Later,""Children of Men,"a remake of "Dawn of the Dead," etc. In books, literary lion Cormac McCarthy recently produced his starkest novel, "The Road," about a father and son traveling across a landscape seemingly blasted out by George Romero and Mad Max. Stephen King, in a lean and mean form, cranked out the zombie novel "Cell," one of his best novels in years. In the hands of a good writer (or director), the raw stuff around us (War, Famine, Plague) can be effectively turned it into hoofbeats on Main Street. Langan is such a writer, and "The Missing" should be considered in the top tier of such books.

In "The Missing," the reader is introduced to small, affluent Corpus Christi, a neighbor to the gritty across the tracks Bedford, which was destroyed in Langan's earlier novel "The Keeper." That said, it isn't necessary to have read "The Keeper," though the return visits to the town are pretty creepy. The story is told through a number of different characters, but primarily, through attrition, becomes the story of Fenstad and Meg Wintrob. Fenstad is the local psychiatrist, Meg is the librarian. On the Eve of Destruction, their marriage is in trouble. How Fenstad holds on to his humanity, while defending his family, and battling his own demons, makes for the most fascinating thread in the novel. You are literally on the fence and on the edge with the guy as the pages zip by.

The cause of all this distress, seems a bit thin and unexplained, considering the havoc to come. On the other hand, there is something so visceral and horrific about the little boy's discovery in the woods that explanation seems unnecessary. Bones. Blood. Death. That's probably all you need to know or understand. And if you recall, the details were not great when Romero's first zombie lurched onto the screen. Sometimes less is more.

Anyway, the days go by for Corpus Christi, and what initially seems troubling, people getting sick, acting strange, etc.,turns into something far more deadly. Langan, who has a medical background, employs her knowledge of disease and symptoms very effectively - without ever overdoing it. "The Missing" are never really missing, but they are different. I'm still not sure what to call the "things" in the book: were-zombie-vampire-things? Whatever they are, what is more interesting is what, beyond the great hunger they feel, motivates them: Anger, Hatred, Resentment. How Langan uses such destructive emotions for her horror was something I noticed in her earlier novel. It makes for effective and intelligent horror, no matter the splatter (and there's plenty of that). These destructive emotions, however, are what Langan seems to be really focusing on, the kind of emotions that find a home in a collective intelligence that one might call Legion.

This is a sequel to another book, The Keeper, which I haven't read. Fortunately, that doesn't really matter & didn't keep me from enjoying this one.

This is a pretty standard horror novel - a mysterious infection takes over a small town in Maine, turning its inhabitants into flesh-eating, well, zombies. It's grim. It's dark. It's gross. It will make you go, "Ewwwww." Exactly what you want from a horror novel.

The influence of Stephen King is all over this book, but I like that Ms. Langan definitely has her own voice. This is a quick read that just might give you nightmares - especially now as we head into flu season.

I was looking for a scary autumn read from a new author and picked this book based on the Stoker award and Amazon recommendations. This book is a sequel, but can be read on its own. The story starts with a school trip to the site of a former industrial meltdown...in this day and age? Where were the parents? Lois, teacher with poor judgment, then realizes they have left the class problem child behind and returns, to have a breakdown and start eating dirt (yup, just what I would do). Anyway, after returning and spreading "it," the town people get sick, die or turn into something worse (vampire, zombie?). The strained horror is redeemed by the characterizations of Maddie, Fen, and Meg, the dysfunctional family, and their humanity redeems the tale. The ending "scientific explanation" is not believable, despite the author's credentials. Overall, okay read with some great subplots. A solid B read.