Growing up in the mid and late ‘70s—amidst classic slasher flicks like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween—I read my fair share of horror novels and anthologies. Looking back on that era, it was in many ways a Golden Age for literary horror. Stephen King was redefining the genre with works like Carrie (1974), 'Salem's Lot (1975), and The Shining (1977). His landmark short story collection Night Shift (1978) is one of the few reads that still scares me. Innovative and truly frightening novels that actually scared the bejesus out of readers were being released at a prolific rate—and becoming mainstays on bestseller lists: Thomas Tryon’s The Other (1971), Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1972), Peter Benchley’s The Deep (1976), Peter Straub’s Ghost Story (1979), etc. It was obvious to me, even at a relatively young age, that readers liked to be scared silly…
But the horror genre has changed dramatically since the ‘70s. And I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing. It’s become more focused on shock and gore than actual fear. A perfect example of this is the recently released Wormfood by Jeff Jacobson, a novel that takes place in a rural Northern California town and features a cast of stereotypical rednecks: Fat Ernst, the morbidly obese—and morally bankrupt—owner of a bar and grille; Bert and Junior Sawyer, sadistic Muppet-like brothers with a criminal résumé that would make Manson jealous (vandalism, theft, grave robbing, having sex with animals, etc.); Misty Johnson, the local hottie with hair the color of “blond sin;” and Arch Stanton, the main character, a gangly 16-year old who lives with his grandmother and is essentially indentured to Fat Ernst indefinitely because he and his grandmother are living on land that Ernst owns.
Hitching a ride to work one day with the Sawyer brothers in their old one-ton Dodge truck with giant tires and proverbial bull skull on the hood, they pass a funeral procession for Earl Johnson, a rich rancher who died tragically in a fishing accident. Paying their respects by yelling expletives and throwing bags of rotting road kill onto the procession, the Sawyer brothers order Arch to drive as they pelt the unlucky funeral goers with carcasses from the back of the truck. The only problem with this is that Arch can’t drive, and after ramming the hearse, the coffin is ejected from the car and lands in a drainage ditch where the ill-fated remains of Earl Johnson quickly disappear under black water…
What ensues is three days of deeply disgusting, vulgarity replete chaos. Johnson’s body, it seems, is infested with a strain of parasitic fish that burrow into dead and dying hosts and eat them from the inside. After a series of unfortunate (and highly illegal) events, the worm-like creatures begin showing up everywhere—and Arch’s pathetic existence takes a turn for the worse…
Okay, there was absolutely nothing even close to “scary” in this novel, which is categorized as horror. The storyline was, at least superficially, completely formulaic and the characters were two-dimensional. That said, I think that’s exactly what Jacobson was trying to do here – create a story that paid homage and playfully mocked the conventions of redneck horror novels and movies (like The Hills Have Eyes). The very first sentences of Wormfood have an undertone of sardonicism:
“Grandma woke me up with her .10 gauge, shooting at the ground squirrels again. I think that was the morning it all started, when the worms got loose and the Sawyer brothers stole the dead steer and Fat Ernst had us break into Earl’s coffin and I tasted Misty Johnson’s sweat and that witch crawled out of the darkness under her lawnmower and a whole hell of a lot of blood got spilled.”
So horror aficionados with strong stomachs and healthy senses of humor should most definitely check out this repulsively entertaining small press release. A word of warning, however: you may never eat meat again.
Paul Goat Allen has been a full-time book reviewer specializing in genre fiction for almost the last two decades and has written more than 6,000 reviews for companies like Publishers Weekly, The Chicago Tribune, and BarnesandNoble.com. In his free time, he reads.
