|
Fiction Review by The Gravedigger
|
03.30.04
|
In a small English town called Shillingham an old gallows, dating back several hundred years, is taken down in order to make room for a new highway. What they find underneath it is a pit containing a withered corpse, impaled by a huge spike. Everything is removed and stored in a nearby building. That evening the corpse, harboring the energy of an ancient, evil creature, gets up and starts destroying the town. It's up to the town's newest resident, an author, and his next-door neighbor, a young woman, to stop this horror. It turns out that the woman's father was the keeper of the secret and 'The Book of the Wyrm', which tells how to dispose of the creature if it ever returns. The father ends up being killed and reanimated as a sort-of-zombie, as do most of the town. There's also this impenetrable fog which surrounds the town, isolating the events from the outside world. The Wyrm boasts that as soon as it emerges from Shillingham, its cocoon, it will take over the Earth.THE WYRM is a quick paced novel, with likeable, fleshed-out characters and a nasty Lovecraftian monster which wreaks quite some destruction. Hundreds of people are killed and reanimated as zombies, all controlled by this entity, and it's up to a handful of people to save the world. This book was originally published in 1987 and now released through Leisure books. There are some things that date the novel (such as records, titles of 'new songs' and the lack of cell-phones), which could have easily been updated but curiously weren't.Written by Stephen Laws (www.stephenlaws.com) and available from dorchesterpub.com
|
Rating: nan out of 10.0 - votes cast total
|
|
|
|
|
