Remember the ’90s? Well…the town of Demise, North Dakota doesn’t, and they’re living in the year 1997. That’s because an alien worm hitched a ride on a comet, crash-landed in the town’s trailer park, and is now infecting animals with a memory-loss-inducing bite-and right before Christmas! Now it’s up to nineteen-year-old Realene and her best friend Nate to stop the spread and defeat the worms before the entire town loses its mind. The only things standing in the way are their troubled pasts, a doomsday cult, and an army of infected prairie dogs.
Dark bleatings, my lovely tribe! If you’re looking for an extremely fun horror novel, look no further than Angela Sylvain’s Frost Bite. This book is an absolute hoot. It has great horror elements – many of them, in fact. We’ve got crazed killer animals, sci-fi spookiness in a crashed comet, a potentially apocalyptic problem, and a lot of really funny, extremely dark humour.
Realene lives in a trailer park, caring for her mother, who has Alzheimer’s. Rea gave up a college scholarship to do this, and works at a gas station to support them. She has all the makings of a great protagonist – she’s down to earth, relatable, with a solid moral core and a demonstrably strong, self-sacrificing character. She isn’t perfect, of course, but she is a damn good person. She has a best friend called Nate, and this friendship also reads as very authentic and very solid. They’re so easy to be invested in, almost immediately.
A meteor crashes, things start going weird and then… the prairie dogs assemble! Do you have any idea how much joy it brings me to write something like “the prairie dogs assemble”? I honestly could not have been more delighted to read about insane, murderous packs of prairie dogs. I’ve seen prairie dogs… they’re one of the cutest creatures in the entire world, so the fact that the author picked this particular animal to centre so much trouble around convinced me that she’s hilarious. These prairie dogs are going around, in vampires from 30 Days of Night fashion, chewing up wires and cutting the town off.
Things escalate in sometimes comical but always disastrous ways, and we follow Rea and Nate as they battle people and creatures, trying to get to the bottom of the issue as it spreads rapidly through their tiny town. Despite the laughs, there are also dark themes here and some genuinely upsetting instances, so while the story was funny, it never felt like a joke.
In short, I loved it. I’d recommend this to horror fans who enjoy killer animals, sci-fi horror, religious nuts, and an all around great time. If you’d like to check out the book or the author, there are some links below for you:
Bleeeeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
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