Imajin Books, $3.99, ISBN 978-1-77223-231-8
Horror, 2016

“Nothing’s wrong with the house, Cathy. I spoke with Les, next door, and he said that the previous owners up and left in the middle of the night.”

They always say this, don’t they? These people move into big houses that they bought at suspiciously low prices, and despite knowing that the previous owners vamoosed under mysterious circumstances, nothing is wrong. Cathy Tremblay, an author, and her husband Mike even invited her mother to move in, because these people have clearly never seen Sinister or every other Blumhouse movie that had come out in this decade.

Naturally, Infestation by rats, spiders, and worse soon occur… and of course, Mike has to be away for the week too – one partner always does this in this kind of stories. Cathy is the type who feels scared after watching that TV show Supernatural of all things – is it because of Jared Padalecki’s increasingly aging visage? Yes, she’s going to have fun alright.

This story is the written word equivalent of a typical made-for-cheap modern day horror schlock – jump scares at predictable places and all the overused tropes that my money can buy. The characters resemble one-dimensional assembly line stereotypes, and there is nothing here that I find genuinely frightening in any way. Worse, this story is exactly what it is. There are no interesting twists or turns – no Bughuul here – so when I reach the “climax” that is telegraphed early on, I can wonder whether the author believes that my life is so exciting that I need something like this to get me feeling a little bit down.

While marketed as weird fiction and horror, Infestation is unlikely to hit it off with horror fans as they would likely have many times already come across many of the story elements here. The predictable denouement only cements the lack of thrill present in this one. Maybe this one should have been more appropriately marketed as Baby’s First Scary House Story.