THE LOOP

Weirdness invades a small Oregon town as a government experiment gone wrong escapes containment.

Where to start with the pop-culture influences that erupt in this second novel by Johnson, author of the novel Skullcrack City (2015) and the story collection Entropy in Bloom (2017)? It opens with a Goonies/Super 8 vibe: There's a bunch of high school misfits led by Lucy, a Peruvian adoptee whose closest friend is “Bucket” Marwani, whose Pakistani heritage makes him another brown kid targeted for abuse by their classmates. The nightmarish scenario goes all Stephen King’s Cell when one of the kids’ classmates goes berserk and kills a teacher before perishing himself. In the meantime, we’re getting broadcasts from the Nightwatchman, a self-styled radio shock jock pulling the curtain back on the utter weirdness erupting in Turner Falls, Oregon, á la Welcome to Night Vale. When things really kick off, it looks like a modernization of the townies-versus–⁠rich-kids trope until the whole thing goes to hell and Lucy and her posse are just fighting for their lives. If you’re into this kind of thing, there are some carrots, like Lucy having her first kiss, which is kind of sweet, but as our heroes descend into the (inevitably) human-made nightmare, it gets pretty grotesque. Is there a secret laboratory? Check—in the supersecret IMTECH facility near our little village of idiots—making something that has gotten completely out of control. Lucy is a fierce protagonist, but from this point it evolves into a wetwork nightmare straight out of Chuck Wendig’s daydreams. There’s some prescient dark humor here, too: “Shoot, man. Maybe. That’s usually how it goes, right? But I don’t know about this situation. The whole city is on fire, man. I don’t think these guys are checking bank balances before they start murdering people. Could be the old rules, rich, poor, none of it means much anymore.”

A wickedly entertaining but also grotesque teen nightmare that’s pretty much Stranger Things meets Rogue One.