THE BOG

by Michael Talbot ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 26, 1986

One of the better horror novels, the first half smashing and worth the straight-faced Ghostbusters second half. What's outstanding here is Talbot's superb scientific and descriptive command of Hovern Bog, near the tight-minded little village of Fenchurch St. Jude in the English countryside. The gassy, bubbling marsh is a place of enormously alive and sinister beauty, flowers, rot, sink holes, mats, sedges, bulrushes, orchids, dead vegetation that curiously expands and contracts--""It reached out with sinewy tentacles and took and entangled and digested. . .[like] some great beast. . ."" Into this bog come young archaeologist David Macauley and his helper Brad Hollister, who have between them uncovered under layers of peat and rot a fantastic lode of sunken bodies perfectly preserved in tannic acid--bodies well over 2,000 years old, from the time of the Roman occupation. The slippery bodies are like blackened eggwhite, every organ preserved; this is a dig of boundless importance. And Talbot keenly manages to impress the reader with every aspect of these bog bodies. Then comes the horror. All of the bodies are chewed around the neck and shoulder and chest with strange teethmarks. It becomes clear that this was sacrifical ground, where living people were bound and offered up to some bizarre bog creature. Will David's family--his wife Melanie, an art historian manquÉ, his daughter Katy, going through the first excruciating tortures of adolescence, and his six-year-old son Tuck--be offered up as victims to the bog monster, which as it happens is still alive? And when David and Melanie dine at the nearby castle of Marquis Grenville de L'Isle, with his incredibly beautiful and sexy girlfriend Julie, little do they know that they are entering a rather Arthurian fairy tale--in which Julie is only one form of the ravenous bog monster and the marquis himself an ogre from another plane who has already lived for countless generations. Overall, the horror's pretty silly, unless you enjoy the rather odd and risky mingling of pure science with fairy lore and gnashed bodies. But the bog itself is terrific.

Pub Date: March 26, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Morrow

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION