The story takes place in the fictional rural Indiana town of Bristol, where Jim and Denise Cambers move their family (14-year-old son Chip, their young twins, Chet and Cassie, along with a horse and a breeding pair of black German Shepherds) from their bustling lives in Louisville.  Both have a background in education, and Jim takes the position of the town’s high school principal while Denise discovers she’s pregnant (with yet another set of twins) and decides to be a stay-at-home mom – WAY back when these types of financial decisions were an option. Their son, Chip, is infuriated with this move until he meets another boy his age, Scott, and they become instant best friends. I liked the characters, and they came off as the typical ‘80s family you’d see in the situation comedies that dominated Network television at the time of this book’s 1988 release. However, things get much more sinister as the story progresses. 

The Cambers’ bags are barely unpacked when they notice something is off with the local wildlife. When Chip and Scott go out bug-collecting for a school assignment, they bring back all kinds of interesting specimens, such as a double-winged butterfly, a two-headed snake, and extra-large carnivorous beetles (which, thankfully, aren’t as big a threat as the beetles I spoke of in my last horror paperback review). What’s even more jarring is their teacher’s nonchalant reaction, which is basically like, “Oh yeah, I see things like this all the time.”

Jim notices strange things going on at his school, too, like the US Government showing up regularly to check the kids’ teeth while giving them free toothpaste and “vitamins.” Jim brings these samples home, but the kids are the only ones using them consistently, as he often forgets to take them, while Denise refuses them outright, stating she doesn’t trust pills where you can’t see the ingredients. This seems like sound reasoning, yet for some reason, she has no issues with her young children taking them. Jim also notices that some people are not aging very well. In one unintentionally funny scene, he tells his secretary how sorry he’s going to be when she retires “in a couple of years,” only to discover she’s barely forty (Doh!). 

But the biggest problem in Jim’s life is his wife, Denise, whose disposition gradually worsens. At first, Jim attributes her “bitchiness” (his words, not mine) to her pregnancy, but soon realizes the problem is more than just hormones. First, they’re at their son’s basketball game, and Jim becomes horrified when his wife “cheers like she’s never cheered before.” I have no idea exactly what this means, since the author never elaborates, but whatever she did made her son cringe all the way out on the basketball court. She also uncharacteristically beats the twins with a yardstick for forgetting to feed the dogs and ruins “family game night” by hurling the Monopoly board across the room after going “bankrupt.” And speaking of bankruptcy, she starts using Jim’s credit cards like they’re printing cash in the barn, leading to a battle of hurling dishware between her and her husband.

This book is well-written, but at over 400 pages, it could easily have had 100 of them skimmed off. Worse, it fails to live up to its monstrous cover art. While there are mutant predators in this book, they seem to disappear from the story as attention gets directed solely to human issues and the effects of a community being used as guinea pigs for fifteen years. I was really looking forward to a paperback mashup of the films The Food of the Gods (1976) and Prophecy (1979), but these elements just seem to fizzle out of the story. After a couple of harrowing instances with a two-headed canine, we get a scene where a giant beaver casually enters their yard and eats a family of raccoons, and the adults react like, “Ok, so that happened…”

Jim goes from being a relatable character to a frustrating one as he recalls a deceased uncle telling him that his family has historically prognosticated evil, while simultaneously dismissing his son, who is constantly telling him EXACTLY what the problem is. It seems like the story swaps monsters for this weird Stephen King’s “The Shining” crap, and introduces a major character from Jim’s past named Bootsy Hancock (seriously). All the twists seem unearned, and the ending is a slap in the face. On the flip side, a 2026 reader could argue that this book was ahead of its time. I will give it that.

So let’s look at the stats…

GENRE: Man vs Nature/Horror 

NUMBER OF PAGES: 429

SHELVE IT OR SCRAP IT? Let’s just say no more rereads for me.

THE MESSAGE: When the US Government shows up in town offering free samples, it’s time to move!

~Dave