Desert Creatures by Kay Chronister

Book Review

Ian Hunter

Well, you couldn’t get a book with a more apt title, so expect a lot of desert and a lot of creatures in Kay Chronister’s first novel, which tells of Magdala and her father, Xavier, who are trying to reach the Holy City of Las Vegas so she can be cured of a disability – her club foot. The Holy City of Las Vegas? I hear you ask. That’s right, that’s the place where a whole load of religious relics have been gathered, and it is a magnet for pilgrims hoping to be cured of whatever ails them. In Chronister’s novel, we are in a post-apocalyptic world where the dead flower and sprout fruit, where there is a lot – and I mean a lot – of body horror, and there are no rules except in the group of survivors, which Magdala and her father join on their travels. It is a bad move, as the group’s rules are extreme, and breaking them means death. The journey is a fight to survive  – an inner struggle to obey the rules of those they have fallen in with and an outer struggle to survive the new life forms that exist now, such as the “stuffed men” who have been infected by the desert, and the strange, dangerous plants and cancerous creatures which have evolved in this strange, new world.

The landscape has been decimated, towns and cities are destroyed, strange cults have emerged, prophets spread their lies, and the days pass to years; Magdala is getting older, and Las Vegas seems no closer until she encounters an exiled priest called Elam, who is one of the “saint-touched”, labelled heretics and cast out, but capable of doing strange, almost miraculous things.

Wonderfully inventive and horrific, Desert Creatures reads like a western/road movie/quest, mashed together with likes of The Thing (Carpenter version for a heavy seasoning of body horror) mashed together with Annihilation, A Boy and His Dog, Mad Max, Damnation Alley, maybe even Beneath the Planet of the Apes. It is a tale of redemption, of hope, of faith, and, let’s not forget, religious fanaticism. Chronister shows herself to be adept at creating a horrific world inhabited by horrific creatures, but she is no slouch on the character development front as Magdela grows from being a wide-eyed, naïve innocent to a hardened survivor.

I have to confess to being a reluctant reader, and I’m allergic to books with thirty-page-long chapters, so I did baulk a little at the prospect of reading Desert Creatures as it is split into three parts – Outlaws, Exiles and Specters – reflecting Magdala’s circumstances, long journey and growth as a character, but there are no chapters, although there are section breaks between the narrative. Gulp. But Desert Creatures is a fast-moving read. Poetic in places and horrific in others. I’m a fan of Chronister’s already because of her collection “Thin Places”, which collects some of her award-nominated short fiction, which has appeared in all the right places. I look forward to catching her next novel, “The Bog Wife”, due out later this year. But in the meantime, take a trip through the desert, but give that horse with no name a wide berth; you don’t want to go near it, or anything else that shambles around there.