Book Review: SWARM (2023), Dark Fantasy Novel Up for Pre-Order
Giant butterfly apocalypse for teens? Sign me up! And a particularly grimdark-looking fantasy book is now available for pre-order.
Thanks to the Books of Horror Facebook group, I learned about a relatively new young adult horror novel entitled Swarm. The person who recommended it described it as a young adult post-apocalyptic novel about killer butterflies and my library system had the audio version on Hoopla, so I gave it a shot.
(The post also reminded me of the insect-horror novels Invasive Species and its sequel Slavemakers. Thanks to a bunch of recent Amazon gift-cards, I snagged those for my Kindle. Both are page-turners, but the second is rushed and would have been better as two books.)
So how was it? Let’s find out.
The Plot
Teen girl Shur is bored in class one fall day when she spots an enormous butterfly out the window of her school. Soon afterward, an emergency alert goes out warning everybody to stay indoors. She, her twin brother Keene, and their two respective best friends Jenny and Nathan ditch school to retrieve much younger brother “Little” (really Sean, after their dad) from day care, but it turns out there are a lot more of said enormous butterflies and they’re hungry for human flesh.
Getting home ahead of the worst bug attacks, Shur, her brother, and their friends barricade themselves in their home as things get progressively worse…
The Good
*I like the slow-burn Lyle starts the story with. The protagonists are teens in high school, not scientists, military planners, etc. and simply don’t know what’s going on. It’s been a long time since junior year, but I can remember 9/11. Thanks to the school closed-circuit TV system we had access to TV news, but even then there was misinformation and confusion. For example, one of the initial casualty reports was 50,000 — that’s the total number of people who worked at the original World Trade Center, but only under a third were there at the time. Imagine a younger generation that primarily uses social media, which lacks fact-checkers and is even more prone to spreading rumors and outright lies, than traditional media. What results is more like COVID than 9/11.
(More on that later.)
*A character’s mental illness, which they might have always had but was exacerbated by a family tragedy, is established early and subtly. And as the story goes on, their mental situation realistically deteriorates. I’m not going to claim to be an expert in mental health, but Lyle’s depiction of the character’s internal monologue and feelings is very vivid and well-done. The character’s actions, particularly their compulsive need to keep busy, also reflect mental illness well. The novel also depicts the problems the character’s condition causes for other people, even if it isn’t their fault.
*The characters are sympathetic and realistic and the reader actually cares about what happens to them. The teen characters often make bad decisions based on emotions and “Little” can be obnoxious, especially when he’s over-tired. They act like real people.
*The narrator Krystal Hammond is good at handling all the different voices, both men and women of different ages. She can realistically pull off a cranky preschooler with “Little,” a sullen teen boy with Keene, and the friendly (and well-armed) rednecky neighbor Bill just as easily as Shur and her BFF Jenny.
*World War I spawned whole genres of literature — the trench poets, Lost Generation types like Hemingway, etc. Although this isn’t the first book I’ve read that seems influenced by the COVID pandemic — that honor belongs to Silent Came The Monster about the Jersey Shore shark attacks, which also includes either polio or the Spanish Flu — it’s the most obvious. The teen protagonists are trapped in the house rather than attending school and what little communication they have with the outside world is largely via rumor-infested social media, the government has imposed lockdown orders, and individuals attempting to deal with the killer-bug problem themselves have…mixed results.
(That said, according to this interview the author has had the idea for years and it seems the book is “about” handling anxiety more so than COVID, even though COVID is mentioned in the book. She doesn’t even mention COVID when she describes her creative process.)
*Not going to go into detail for reasons of spoilers, but toward the end there’s a real “darkness before the dawn” and then, as the Writing Excuses podcast would put it, “a stand up and cheer” moment. It was well-done.
The Bad
*The book is rather long for what it is. The print book is 336 pages long, which isn’t that long for a book, but the audio version is over ten hours.
The Verdict
Definitely worth a read or a listen. 9.0 out of 10.
A Real Grimdark Dark Fantasy Book Is Now Up For Pre-Order
In addition to the horror group I mentioned earlier, I’m also a member of a Facebook group dedicated to “grimdark” fiction. The term comes from the tabletop game Warhammer 40,000, whose slogan is “in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.” 40K is an example of grimdark science fiction, but in the realm of fantasy there’s George R.R. Martin’s book series A Song of Ice and Fire (which became the TV show Game of Thrones) and Mark Lawrence’s Broken Empire novels, which I own on Kindle but haven’t (yet) read. Basically bleak, violent, dystopian, etc.
Well, fellow group member Lucius Tarquinius (check out his Substack) has a book available for pre-order — Choice, the first book in his Desperate Echoes series. Here’s a draft of the first chapter, since the sample isn’t yet available to read on Amazon. It’s a rather ghoulish poem that exposits both how the magic system works (child sacrifice) and the brutal medieval social order and religious persecution that exists in this world.
And here’s the cover:
The world sounds pretty dark even by grimdark standards. Full disclosure, the author included my Battle for the Wastelands price promotion in his Substack at the end of June and I’m returning the favor. That particular Substack includes the second chapter of Desperate Echoes, so if you liked that first one, you can keep going.