Wormfood

In the poor, isolated town of Whitewood, California, 16-year-old Arch Stanton has a bad job at the local bar and grill that is about to get much worse and, despite his skills with firearms, he may not survive the weekend. Arch’s boss, Fat Ernst, would do anything for a chance at easy money, and when he forces Arch to do some truly dirty work, all hell breaks loose. Suddenly, the customers—infected by vicious, wormlike parasites—begin dying in agonizing pain. As events spiral out of control, decades of bitter rivalries resurface and boil over into three days of rapidly escalating carnage.

From Publishers Weekly

Creative cursing and caricatures are all this soi-disant horror novel has to offer readers. While driving a truck for his hillbilly friends so they can moon the funeral procession of a prominent and hated local rancher, scrawny, shy Arch Turner accidentally knocks the casket into an irrigation ditch, and the corpse releases an infestation of foot-long wormlike creatures that slowly kill from the inside out. The ensuing havoc includes infected cheeseburgers, a lot of shotgun ammo, two very angry elderly women, one dazzling belt buckle, and a ton of blood. Jacobson's attempt at a cheesy B-movie on paper has plenty of colorful stereotypes, vulgar language, and truly disgusting descriptions of the damage wrought by the worms on human and bovine bodies, but it's short on the actual scares. (July) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Over the decades, horror fiction has featured some very unsavory creatures, from swamp things to zombies, but never have they been more unappetizing than the ravenous worms infesting Jacobson’s debut horror novel. Life for dirt-poor, trailer-dwelling teen Arch Stanton is a daily grind. When he’s not mopping the floor in Fat Ernst’s ramshackle restaurant, he’s riding around in a pickup truck doing odd jobs with the trash-talking, redneck Sawyer brothers. But things are about to get much worse when the truck plows into a hearse bearing the corpse of a local rancher, pitching the dismembered body into a ditch along with some nasty, white foot-long worms. Then Fat Ernst sends Arch and the brothers on a midnight run to poach a dead steer from a fetid pool, and the worms wind up in the cheeseburgers and bellies of the restaurant’s prominent gun-toting patrons, with mayhem the result. While Jacobson devotes more ink to stomach-turning imagery than to genuinely fear-inducing scenarios, fans of his particular brand of gross-out horror will relish it. --Carl Hays

About the Author

Jeff Jacobson is a fiction and screenwriting professor at Columbia College–Chicago. His stories have appeared in Doorways Magazine and Read by Dawn volumes one and three. He lives near Chicago.

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