Books to Die For

Sarah Langan's THE MISSING

Whenever someone suggests to me that there aren't many women writing horror, I tell them they're just not looking hard enough (or perhaps at all). This is especially true considering how many lists of female horror authors get uploaded to the web every February as part of the Women in Horror Month, or the ones that drop every year during the Halloween season.

If you're looking for women horror writers you should be reading, Sarah Langan definitely deserves a place on your list. For today's Book to Die For, we roll back the clocks to her 2007 novel THE MISSING (first covered in Rue Morgue #71).

When the local paper mill closed then burned to the ground, Bedford, Maine, became a ghost town. But something was left behind, something that still lives in the woods. Something ravenous. Something in search of a host.

Set in the fictional town of Corpus Christi, Maine, the tales concerns parasitic creatures that infect their hosts with a disease before mutating them. Steeped with believable characters, fully realized locales and genuine chills, THE MISSING is an incredibly powerful work of horror. It also includes some major social and political commentary. Of the recurring themes in Langan's work, the concept of economic and social decay is always at the forefront.

"I think I just have a really strong sense of injustice and I see things in decline right now," she told Rue Morgue at the time of the book's release. "I'm so upset about it and I have no idea what to do. My book is about trying to put those feelings into context."

In this case, both the virus and the monsters at the heart of THE MISSING serve as a thinly veiled metaphor for capitalism and consumerism. "It's not just where we are, but where we're headed," she elaborates. "And what capitalism does and what the end points of capitalism are. ... There's some scary stuff [out there], there's always been, I think maybe writers are more sensitive to it. Maybe we've always been on the cusp of ruin.

Lois Larken, one of the first characters readers meet THE MISSING, certainly toes that line. After giving up a prestigious academic opportunity to return home to the small town she grew up in, she took a teaching job and got engaged to a local. Now, her fiance has dumped her for her best friend and one of her students has vanished into the woods outside of Bedford while under her supervision on a school trip. Things have never looked more hopeless. Yet, as she stumbles through the brush looking for her young charge, she finds something else: a ring of bones, a mass animal grave and a voice that promises to make everything better.

Like the rest of the characters in THE MISSING, Lois is flawed and just as likely to make a bad decision as anyone in the real world. It's that very imperfection that makes Langan's leap so believably off the page. That said, there are no horror movie-style heroes in Langan's writing, nor are there any neat conclusions. The plague in THE MISSING, despite its inhuman agent, spreads very much like a real virus would, and of course Langan, who holds a Masters degree in English and has worked as an environmental toxicologist, has the ideal background to make it ring true.

"I was taking this class [at NYU], Organ System Toxicology and the ways different toxins effect different parts of the body, and immediately I was thinking, 'Well, what would a virus do?"" she recalls. "It's true we have the genetic codes of viruses in our DNA, some of which are symbiotic. I think we think we're in control of our bodies, and in fact these impulses that we have may occasionally be a foreign organism."

In the case of THE MISSING, the creatures get their traits not only from actual disease but also from some famiiar horror archetypes, including vampires and zombies.

"I was really writing a book about consumption, this inability to stop eating, so it was sort of a mix of those things," explains Langan. "I think vampires are kind of sexier, I think they sort of embody the kind of appetites that I wanted to illustrate in this book - which is animal compulsion. Zombies are blind consumers, vampires do things because they are sensual, they do things because of a need or a materialism. I wanted to mix those two things, so originally it was vampires, but they weren't vampires... [so] what are they?"

Langan smartly leaves that up to readers to decide.

THE MISSING can be purchased from Amazon for under $10 in both paperback and eBook.