Husk reminds me of a time in my life before bills, before work, before any substantive responsibility in my life (though it certainly didn't feel like it at the time). A time when I was in middle and high school and I could go rent five VHS B-horror movies for 5 bucks, sit down with a root beer, and enjoy a horror movie that was perhaps not high art, but they were entertaining.
What does this have to do with Husk? It's a throwback to those movies (in book form). To Pumpkinhead, and Night of the Demons, or Friday the 13th. It's a book that eschews a lot of the trends of modern horror and goes back to good, old-fashioned fun horror. It may not be a total masterpiece, but you're having too much fun to really care.
Husk tells the story of a group of people in a small town in Minnesota - a father recently reunited with his kids, a burnt out and scarred ex-policeman, and a love sick teen to name a few - who become slowly aware of a horrible evil in their midst. The evil is after one of their own for it's own purposes - purposes that you can imagine are not very pleasant.
The writing is straightforward in many ways, but not by any means simplistic. It has a delicate balance of simplicity, metaphor, and style that makes it easy to read. The prose is neither overwrought nor coy and Hults throws a curveball into the text at appropriate points to keep the reader engaged. The characters are good. He avoids the pitfall of making them unrealistic or unlikable, but they are are suitably tarnished in their own ways to be believable. The ex-policeman Frank was a favorite of mine as a man determined to fight the evil, but painfully aware of how careful he has to be to avoid being labeled a psychotic. The teen characters are pretty realistically written, though not quite to the levels of Ryan C. Thomas' Hisser which nailed the teen voice pretty freakin' convincingly.
On the downside, the monster's powers (while intriguing) feel a bit pat in terms of its all encompassing ability to triumph over the people trying to escape it. There's a couple of times where the credulity of its skills felt a bit stretched even by horror standards. The only other real complaint I can level at it is that some of the arguing between Frank and his detective counterpart wears a bit thin at times as she tries to rationalize away the supernatural events occurring around her. I know it has to be done (hell it's a staple of horror that authority figures not believe the threat facing them), but it went on a little longer than I would have liked to see.
Bottom line, though, these are small complaints. Hults comes close to putting a Friday night late show horror movie to the page in a way that I've only seen done in books like Bryan Dunn's Moon Rocks before. Well worth a read.
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- Reviewed in the United States on December 14, 2014
- Reviewed in the United States on January 25, 2012
Top reviews from other countries
- John MiltonReviewed in the United Kingdom on September 13, 2012
Hults delivers pitch-perfect horror in 'Husk'
