REVIEW: Desert Creatures

“I recognized my guilt like an old friend standing politely and soundlessly beside me, until I could divide a man into a series of useful pieces without ever considering what he had been when he was still whole.”

Horror is known for its incredible, disgusting, creative ideas. The themes and stories horror authors come up with are what makes the genre so unique, but they are not often so beautifully written. Desert Creatures by Kay Chronister is a shockingly gorgeous novel about salvation, promise, death, and rebirth.

Though the cause of Chronister’s apocalypse is unknown, the devastation it wreaked upon the United States (and, ostensibly, the world) destroyed food and water sources and introduced a new monster: a hybrid between humans and the desert. While pilgrims make the trek to the previously-hedonistic, now-sacred Las Vegas, they avert their eyes from these desert creatures (hey, that’s the name of the book!) and keep their focus on the gleaming trash piles of the place where fraternity brothers used to run amok. Magdala, our physically disabled main character, is determined to heal her clubfoot by making this same pilgrimage. Her journey across the American Southwest is rife with beautifully gory imagery, fear, beauty, and connection.

Ecological horror is a particularly timely genre. As humans become further disconnected from the earth, the earth will make herself known. Just this week in California, we’ve been subjected to a deluge, historic damage, destruction, and death from Lake Tahoe to Los Angeles. The more we try to desecrate nature and disconnect ourselves, the more our bodies will rebel. Ecological horror blurs the lines between human bodies and the earth in a viscerally unnerving way, giving voice to the deeply ingrained fear of the unknown. Chronister describes cactus-human-javelina-wolf hybrids that encompass the evisceration of solid lines of Human and Not Human. Evolutionarily, we are made to be scared of what we don’t understand. But what if we understand the pieces, but not the whole?

RATING: ☆☆☆☆☆