May 6, 2024
A small California town is cut off from the rest of the country by a catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions in Belardes’s uneven debut horror novel. Bayside oyster farmer Bernhard Vestinos first notices something amiss when a rampant snail infestation overruns his beds, forcing him to take deadly measures. What appears to be a manmade eco-disaster ultimately proves to have an otherworldly component as a contagion with an inexplicable side effect spreads through town: people begin “deading,” dropping to the ground in apparent death throes, only to revive minutes later and obliviously go about their business. That’s enough weirdness for a government drone squadron to enforce a protective perimeter around the town. Within that inescapably sealed environment, the social glue of Bayside quickly gives way to the ascent of the Risers, a quasireligious cult violently hostile to the non-deading minority. Belardes toggles between the perspectives of a variety of townspeople, including the Enriquez brothers—Chango and Blas—but his efforts to give the horrors a human dimension bog down in the minutiae of their lives (especially the details of Blas’s amateur birding). Still, this patchwork of familiar horror plot motifs offers some fun scares.