Worms and mermaids and... Cthulhu?

I snuck in a second trashy beach read this season, a horror novel called The Conqueror Worms by Brian Keene. It's published by Leisure, a company known for its line of horror novels, some of which can be fairly gory, as this one is. To be fair, though the gore is extreme, it is limited to two or three scenes in the book; it's only a little more over-the-top than Stephen King can get.

The book feels like it was two novelettes stitched together. 40 days of unending rains have come to the world (or at least the eastern United States), flooding most coastal cities, drenching even some of the inland states including West Virginia where the first part of the book is set. An old coot named Teddy is struggling to survive after he ignored warnings to vacate his land; his carport now is covered with layers of earthworms, and gigantic worm monsters seem to be digging their ways out of the earth and hiding in the woods. We follow him and a buddy as they try to stay one step ahead of the man-eating worms and a crazed acquaintance with a gun.

Halfway through the book, a helicopter crashes and we get the story of two young survivors (Kevin and Sarah) from Baltimore, where mermaids are drawing men to their deaths and a group of crazed folks think they know what's going on: some horrific primitive gods have loosed themselves on our world. Lovecraft is name-checked (as is H.G. Wells) and Kevin is pretty sure that the huge monster that is slaughtering people and tearing down skyscrapers might be Cthulhu itself, even though he knows it's a fictional creature. The slightly disappointing finale leaves Teddy barely alive and the fate of the others unclear, though there is an ambiguous (and fitting) sign of hope in the last few sentences. Or not...

Keene (at left) creates characters who are likable and real, but I never got invested enough in any of them to really care about their fates, even old Teddy. The Baltimore narrative could have been a stand-alone story, and fleshed out a bit more, even a separate novel. We wind up never knowing anything more about what's caused the apocalypse than we did at the beginning, and the world Keene sketches is interesting enough to make me wish we did, or that we could get more stories set in that wet world. A fast, mostly mindless read, which is pretty much what I wanted.

PS--I just found out that there is indeed a collection of stories, Earthworm Gods, set in the Conqueror Worms universe. Maybe a good read for October.