“Compassion. Community. Hygiene.”
– motto of Eliada township, Idaho, circa 1911
It’s no surprise that Toronto
writer David Nickle is being compared to a young Stephen King. The National
Post’s Alex Good called him a worthy heir to the mantle of King: “And I don’t
mean the King of Under the Dome or other recent flops, but the master of
psychological suspense who ruled the ’80s with classics like Pet Sematary…”
Nickle’s debut novel Eutopia – an entrancing amalgam of historical thriller,
dark fantasy and weird fiction – is an utterly creepy, bladder-loosening,
storytelling tour de force.
Set in remote locales of early 20th century Idaho and Montana, and revolving around the fanatical philosophies of the father of the American eugenics movement, Charles Davenport, Eutopia begins cloaked as an intriguing, richly described historical fiction novel. Doctor Andrew Waggoner – a black physician trained at a prestigious Paris medical school by some of the finest surgeons in the world – finds himself working in a hospital in an Idaho mill town called Eliada. The town, established in part by philanthropist Garrison Harper and, secretly, by Davenport’s own Eugenics Records Office, is a Utopian dream come true in the “stern Paradise” of northern Idaho. But unbeknownst to Waggoner, something sinister is going on inside of the very hospital he works in, behind the locked doors of the quarantine ward…
Seventeen-year old Jason Thistledown
watched as his mother became ill with fever and died a horrible death inside of
their small cabin located in the wilderness outside of Cracked Wheel, Montana.
When his alleged aunt shows up and informs Jason that he is the sole survivor
of a plague that killed all of the inhabitants of Cracked Wheel, he considers
himself lucky – until he reaches Eliada and begins connecting the strange
disease that wiped out an entire town with the research being done by a
possibly deranged chief physician at the hospital, a man obsessed with the “betterment
of all mankind.”
Early on in the novel, Waggoner is brutally attacked in the night by what appear to be members of the Klu Klux Klan. He and another man are brought to a hanging tree where they’re about to be lynched. But as Waggoner watches the other victim – a white man called Mister Juke – being strung up, he realizes that there is something very wrong with this mysterious man: he’s too tall, too thin, with a peculiarly shaped head, and his eyes are all pupil, with no iris. Moments from death, Pinkerton agents arrive, kill the klansmen, and save Waggoner and his freakish companion. But when Waggoner begins asking questions about the strange Mr. Juke, the agents clam up. In fact, no one is willing to talk to Waggoner about the man who has been living secretly in quarantine for months without his knowing.
Thus begins a quest for the truth to uncover the real mission of the bizarre utopian town – but as Waggoner and Thistledown get closer to their answers, they also move nearer to a narcotic, hellish, rapturous, kind of insanity…
The historical fiction ambiance slowly but surely darkens and thickens – into a “foul broth” – and before readers even realize it, they have stumbled headfirst into a twisted, horrifying story of forced sterilization, rape, mass murder, and the awakening of a nightmarish, godlike entity that would make H.P. Lovecraft proud.
While the comparisons to a
young Stephen King are certainly accurate, I’d categorize David Nickle more in
the vein of writers like Lovecraft, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Algernon
Blackwood. Horror and dark fantasy fans who are glorying in the new generation
of brilliant writers like Laird Barron, John Langan, Brian Hodge, Kaaron
Warren, etc. should better add David Nickle to that list. He’s that good.
And additional kudos go out to ChiZine Publications. I’ve reviewed almost a dozen of their releases over the last few years (The World More Full of Weeping by Robert J. Wiersma, The Door to Lost Pages by Claude Lalumière, The Thief of Broken Toys by Tim Lebbon, etc.) and have not been disappointed once. In fact, every single release has been nothing short of spectacular. Readers in search of a virtual cache of dark literary speculative fiction need look no farther than this outstanding small publisher.
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.
