![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
This was a Goodreads rec - I'm going to try to make my way through my Goodreads recs, which keep growing! - and also an ebook. It's lightweight and seemed short, though maybe that's just me.
Daryl Gregory's fiction tends to be offbeat, even for f/sf and this was no exception. A group of people in therapy discuss what happened to them to bring them there. All the reasons are supernatural/horrific, with a strong undertone of Lovecraft. The town where one of them fights monsters is called Dunnsmouth. Another one escaped from cannibals who ate bits of him. A third one escaped from a cult of women that worshipped a djinn and wanted her to be the djinn's next host.
I wasn't totally satisfied with the outcome, but I guess the book worked in the sense that it was very creepy, I couldn't leave it alone and three am may not have been the best time to finish reading it. As a onetime Cthulhu player, I identified most with Harrison, who encountered Lovecraftian creatures and lived, with somewhat fewer brain cells, to tell the tale. There's a book about those events but I haven't read that yet.
Following this I've started a reread, Joshua Guess's Victim Zero There is a huge variety of quality among zombie apocalypse books, but this author writes some of the good ones. I started with his 'diary' of the apocalypse, Living With the Dead but Victim Zero and its sequels can be read without those. It's the story of the doctor whose research was appropriated by (government) idiots and turned into catastrophe. I'd suggest reading the lot like I did, though. They are very intense but very human, not reliant on survivalists with a lot of guns. Though some guns do come in useful. Small spoiler: Nothing happens to the viewpoint character's pet ferrets!
Daryl Gregory's fiction tends to be offbeat, even for f/sf and this was no exception. A group of people in therapy discuss what happened to them to bring them there. All the reasons are supernatural/horrific, with a strong undertone of Lovecraft. The town where one of them fights monsters is called Dunnsmouth. Another one escaped from cannibals who ate bits of him. A third one escaped from a cult of women that worshipped a djinn and wanted her to be the djinn's next host.
I wasn't totally satisfied with the outcome, but I guess the book worked in the sense that it was very creepy, I couldn't leave it alone and three am may not have been the best time to finish reading it. As a onetime Cthulhu player, I identified most with Harrison, who encountered Lovecraftian creatures and lived, with somewhat fewer brain cells, to tell the tale. There's a book about those events but I haven't read that yet.
Following this I've started a reread, Joshua Guess's Victim Zero There is a huge variety of quality among zombie apocalypse books, but this author writes some of the good ones. I started with his 'diary' of the apocalypse, Living With the Dead but Victim Zero and its sequels can be read without those. It's the story of the doctor whose research was appropriated by (government) idiots and turned into catastrophe. I'd suggest reading the lot like I did, though. They are very intense but very human, not reliant on survivalists with a lot of guns. Though some guns do come in useful. Small spoiler: Nothing happens to the viewpoint character's pet ferrets!