Thank you to Crystal Lake Publishing for sending me a copy of this book for review; apparently they liked what I had to say about Nick Roberts's 'The Exorcist's House'. This plays in a very different subgenre of horror, but it plays well nonetheless and two strong books out of two for any small press means that they're clearly doing it right. It looks like they were founded in South Africa and have published a hundred or so books thus far, with a few Bram Stoker Award-winners among them. I look forward to reading more from them in the future.

Initially, this feels very patient and very cinematic, across two different strands of plot.

The first tells us that something serious has happened, because Nicole Lynn Barlowe, who's a systems analyst at Medusa Engineering Corporation, is being interrogated by the government about it in the ominous form of the Defense Intelligence Agency. What it actually is, we don't quite know yet, but Nikki is a bright and sassy tech who refuses to be intimidated and gives as good as she gets. It's easy to see these scenes on a big screen, with a Charlize Theron or a Brie Larson leading the movie. She may be in an inherent position of weakness, as a prisoner in an interrogation room, but her power is refusing to acknowledge that weakness.

In a separate thread, in flashback, we meet the various male leads as they collectively shelter from a vicious storm at Thompson's Kwik Gas, somewhere in the middle of nowhere on Route 60 in New Mexico. There's Otis Thompson, the old timer who runs the place; Pale and Caleb Brady, a father and son on their way to Texas; and Ken Lightfeather, a trucker who knows something is different about this storm, which doesn't make scientific sense. Never mind the purple lightning, there's hot, dry air mixed with rain. This is cinematic too, because I've already seen it on the big screen, these early scenes reminiscent of the Paradise Falls Diner in 2010's Legion, only a couple of states over in the Mojave Desert of California.

The positives at this point is that Toucher roots everything in character and that he gives those characters an impressive set of dialogue to give it all life. It's easy to delineate them because they're different colours and ages, but it's also easy to delineate them because they're very different people, something that's made even more obvious when the primary antagonist sends them each deep into their own fears. The storm brings each of them something very different and they each bring something very different in response to it. Oddly, given that everyone else is male, it's Nikki who gets the best dialogue, but nobody misses out on good lines.

The negatives are mostly not Toucher's fault. There's some inconsistent use of fonts in the interview sections, the use of justification with a monospace font annoying but entirely appropriate for government documents, a slip here and there into regular serifed body text less so. There are too many slips with smartquotes and an occasionally lapse in proofing, like Haley's Comet. Are we suddenly talking Bill rather than Edmond? This sort of thing doesn't show up so often to be a problem for most readers but it was often enough for me to feel the need to write this paragraph.

The only negative that we could lay at Toucher's feet is perhaps not a negative at all, because it'll depend on what individual readers care about. Some will certainly see it as a negative that this is fundamentally simple, very little actually happening over the course of a full two hundred and fifty page novel. The whole thing only encompasses one night, after all, with a skimpy cast of characters dealing with the fallout from one event.

That's one fair take, but another is the exact opposite, that Toucher does a heck of a lot with that simple plot, delving so deeply into the characters of that skimpy cast that we care about all of them and feel for them, not just in the here and now but in what they have to deal with when they're thrown into their darkest memories. To readers who see it that way, it's an emphatic positive. Oddly, I find myself in this latter category, even if it's pretty clear from the suggestion that Caleb is special that this is an aspect he probably learned from Stephen King books, of which I'm not overly fond because of how talky and character-driven they are.

I can probably talk a little about that event, because it's detailed in the back cover blurb and so can't count as a spoiler. Nikki was working at the Very Large Array, a Medusa Engineering installation that was designed not for the purposes she and many scientists involved thought but for something far more sinister. That's Project Dragonfire, which neatly merges cosmic horror with technothriller, taking us away from King and more into a realm we probably associate with H. P. Lovecraft, while still focusing on it with a cinematic eye. Should this be ever turned into the feature it probably was in Toucher's mind, it could be seen as a horror movie, action flick, sci-fi film and thriller.

There's even a pivotal movie magic moment like the "welcome to Jurassic Park" scene. Here, it takes place at Thompson's Kwik Gas, as the storm rages right above them, hammering the forecourt with blasts of lightning, almost deafening them with sound and energising anything metal within human bodies down to the fillings in their teeth, even changing the air pressure in the room. It's Caleb who takes the Sam Neill role of witnessing the moment first, as a high tension power pylon chooses to uproot its concrete base and start walking across the desert. Needless to say, they're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

That back cover blurb goes with a tag of "black magic meets Big Tech" and I've just suggested a cosmic horror technothriller, so you can pretty much figure out what's happening here without a lot of surprises. Where the surprises come may be in how far Toucher is willing to go in certain scenes, a couple at the Very Large Array in particular, and how much emotion he manages to wring out of the rest, all the way to the heroic finalé and an open-minded ending that seems more than ready for a sequel. I hope Toucher writes one, because I'd love to know more about what the villain of the piece is trying to do and how close he came to meeting his goals in this book. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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