Suffer the Children by Craig DiLouie
My rating: 4/5 cats
this is an excellent piece of literary horror, and a clever spin on the traditional vampire story.
in this novel, we see the rise of an epidemic that comes to be known as “herod’s syndrome” in which all children who have not yet reached puberty suddenly die. not after an illness, not with any warning signs, they just suddenly drop dead, all at once.
the immediate aftermath of this is grim – in the relatively small suburb of lansdowne, michigan, where this story takes place, they are suddenly faced with 90,000 tiny bodies, and the traditional rituals of corpse-disposal and burial and even grief itself become impractical and are replaced by the horrifying but necessary removal of the bodies by the sanitation department after which they are tossed into mass graves before rot can set in. nearly everyone has lost someone, but there is no time for proper mourning, and the collective-grief isolates people in the same way that a single death generally brings people together to offer comfort. but the shock and horror – the unknowing – leaves no room or time for the comfort of a community.
this book is most horrifying when it is relaying these kinds of details. supernatural elements are all well and good – chilling in their own way, but when it comes right down to it, it is the “this shit could actually happen” horrors that are the most effective. to me. because i do not believe in vampires. but a sudden pandemic that leaves thousands dead and necessitates thousands of bodies being heaped in a giant hole without even a marker to identify the final resting place of a loved one? yeah, that i believe in.
and that would be horrifying enough, but then dilouie is kind enough to lay out what the loss of an entire generation means to the economy, and ultimately, the continuation of the species.
“We’ve got serious problems ahead. Think about all the industries serving kids. Toys, books, TV networks. Movies, breakfast cereal, clothes, car seats. Schools, teachers, pediatricians – jeez, the list goes on and on. They’re all basically out of business. We’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars, a big chunk of the GDP right there. There’s going to be a massive recession…That’s not even the half of it. There’s going to be at least a twelve-year gap in student enrollment in all schools and colleges, in workers contributing to Social Security, in new people entering the workforce. Think about how many geniuses we lost when Herod’s struck. Kids who would have grown up to cure cancer or make a better lightbulb.”
add to this all of the adult suicides in the wake of herod’s, and the fact that since unborn babies also died in the womb during the herod event, it seemed that indicate that we might not ever be able to bring a baby to term again, and you got yourself a horror story.
but then we go back into the supernatural. because the kids – they come back. after three days, they climb out of their graves and find their way home to their parents, smelling like what you would smell like if you had been dead for three days. at first, it seems to be a miracle! parents who have been grieving for three days do not care about the smell of rot when it is on the bodies of their returned children. they are just so grateful to have them back. and they hug those little gas-bloated bodies close and thank the heavens above for their reunion.
until they die again.
oh, this emotional seesaw!
but all is not lost. soon it is discovered that if the children ingest human blood, they can be briefly revived. one and a half pints of blood enables one child to come back to life for about three hours, after which they return to their death-state, during which their bodies continue to break down as though they had never come back to life. but blood is a finite resource, and the body can only give so much before it begins to suffer anemia, headaches, weakness and confusion.
“It’s not recommended to give blood more than once every fifty-six days. It takes that long for the average healthy body to regenerate the lost red blood cells. Take too much, and the body starts to shut down.”
and that’s where things begin to get really scary. because what would you sacrifice to keep your children alive, even briefly? your money, your morals, your health, your body? what wouldn’t you trade to keep your family together? what if you have more than one child? what if you are a single mother with only one body to drain?
and things get ugly, because there isn’t much that parents wouldn’t do for their children. and they will do it all. there is one particularly chilling scene that takes place in a grocery store that proves my point about real-horror being wayyyy scarier than supernatural horror.
things escalate from there, as they do, and both the children and the parents go through terrible transformations as the story narrows towards its horrifying conclusion.
it is wonderful, frightening, bloody stuff, in an admirably layered story that is so much more than just a vampire tale. i definitely want more from this guy.
