The Deading

May 6, 2024
A small California town is cut off from the rest of the country by a catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions in Belardes’s uneven debut horror novel. Bayside oyster farmer Bernhard Vestinos first notices something amiss when a rampant snail infestation overruns his beds, forcing him to take deadly measures. What appears to be a manmade eco-disaster ultimately proves to have an otherworldly component as a contagion with an inexplicable side effect spreads through town: people begin “deading,” dropping to the ground in apparent death throes, only to revive minutes later and obliviously go about their business. That’s enough weirdness for a government drone squadron to enforce a protective perimeter around the town. Within that inescapably sealed environment, the social glue of Bayside quickly gives way to the ascent of the Risers, a quasireligious cult violently hostile to the non-deading minority. Belardes toggles between the perspectives of a variety of townspeople, including the Enriquez brothers—Chango and Blas—but his efforts to give the horrors a human dimension bog down in the minutiae of their lives (especially the details of Blas’s amateur birding). Still, this patchwork of familiar horror plot motifs offers some fun scares.

May 16, 2024
A small fishing community becomes ground zero for a mysterious virus in Belardes' cerebral eco-horror debut. In seemingly idyllic Baywood, California, snails begin washing ashore and fatally attacking humans. When the afflicted start "deading"--dying from their injuries only to come back to life as "Risers"--it's soon clear that their new forms have little resemblance to who they were before. When the government quarantines the area, the surviving residents and the Risers alike grapple with the implications of their new reality, with some plotting their escape while others succumb to a fanatical worship of death. Unfolding via multiple perspectives, the novel switches between first and third person, a choice that effectively disorients the reader by offering a heightened you-are-there sense of urgency to the story, and Belardes' thought-provoking exploration of societal collapse feels completely of the moment. Though comparisons to The Last of Us and Stephen King's Under the Dome are inevitable, The Deading will also appeal to fans of Justin Cronin and Stephen Graham Jones.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 1, 2024
Eco-horror arrives in Baywood, a small coastal California town. The students of Baywood High are uneasy and irritated. They gripe: "Now, all kinds of adults are pretending to die. Deading. That's what we call it, have been calling it, because, well, we've done it before, like more than a year before the adults ever thought to start their stupid version." The kids deaded to make a point, but now something eerie is happening with the adults, "something completely unrelated. Something similar. Everywhere in Baywood, people lying on sidewalks and streets." The chapters pivot among different perspectives to tease out what's happening. Then an esoteric cult called the Risers appears amid the supernatural chaos to heighten anxieties about the current situation. The characters include Bernhard Vestinos, the owner of an oyster farm; Chango Enriquez, one of his employees; Chango's teenage brother, Blas, an avid birder; Ingram Evans, an older birder; and Kumi Sato, Ingram's friend. At a certain point, it's hard to keep track of all the characters, though Chango and Blas are persistent standouts because of their relatable sibling interactions. The story is told from every possible point of view: Chapters from different third-person perspectives meld with a collective "we" that represents the teens of Baywood. One chapter uses the second person "you," and several are told in the first person. Scientific information about oysters and birds is fascinating but eventually overtakes the plot. Blas and his fellow students are smart, cleareyed, sardonic, sometimes apathetic in a way that captures adolescence. They're fed up with the adults' lack of action in the important matters that caused them to "dead" in the first place: "We did it to make fun of ourselves. We did it because we die and it isn't fair. You see, we'd already held GUN CONTROL rallies, BLACK LIVES MATTER rallies, EARTH DAY rallies. Those always got us nowhere. Adults don't listen. We know that." Admirably, these teen characters continue to place blame where it belongs. An enticing premise and promising characters, but in desperate need of focus.

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