Cicada insanity or the insanity of man? [Brood X by Joshua Dysart]

 

TKO Studios presents Brood X by Eisner-nominated writer Joshua Dysart (UNKNOWN SOLDIER, B.P.R.D.)

With the Red Scare on the rise and a looming fear of nuclear war gripping the nation, seven laborers gather under the smoldering heat of an Indiana summer to begin a curious project: constructing a bomb shelter in the middle of nowhere.

But when the emergence of a once-in-a-century cicada swarm ushers in a series of increasingly unlikely accidental deaths on the site, the survivors start eying each other with more than just suspicion. And with good reason. One of them has heard the cicadas' maddening song before.

Brood X is a nail-biting murder mystery unlike any other that will leave you guessing until the very last page. By best-selling author Joshua Dysart with illustrations by internationally-renowned artist M.K. Perker.

A quick read, complete in a few hours, Joshua Dysart's Brood X is a fantastic work of horror-adjacent prose. A whodunnit told in almost lyrical fashion, this was a read I thought I'd do bit by bit over days, but I kept coming back to the same day. I'd read a bit and before I knew it I was a quarter more of the way done. Sprinkled throughout the text are painstaking illustrations from M.K. Perker that perfectly capture respective heights of emotion. 

When a group of mysteriously contracted laborers start to die in rural Indiana during an eerie cicada emergence and swarm, you can bet that people's imaginations will get the best of them. "Something isn't right here," they say and know, surely chalking it up to some unexplainable supernatural quality or state of being. But minute details aren't adding up. In fact those minute details hint at another explanation. 

In the way it echoed expected social prejudices in character interactions, I'd say the story was pretty believable. I know it's a thing when one character is inanely murderous just for the sensation of new things, but I don't know that I'll ever fully buy into that myself. As we neared the story end, the revelation of the reality of the happenings was a shock. For one, I was expecting some sci-fi type explanation. Doesn't mean I wasn't satisfied. I was sad for many of the characters, but the way it ended was realistic? Action was taken based on likely outcome and with survival in mind. It's the sad truth of it all. 

Did I like my read? Yes, yes I did. Was the ending surprisingly and slightly out of left field for me? Absolutely. What's my rating? 4 stars. It's always a bit jarring to be reading something fictional, realism aside, and be immediately set in a "racial reality." It's sometimes much. And then there were characters I was rooting for who lost themselves in the frenzy of drama. But I'd recommend this book and I had a fun time.

Brood X (ISBN: 9781952203282) is due for publication January 12, 2022.