Horror Review: The Nest by Gregory A. Douglas (1980, Zebra Publishing)

Peter Benchley has a lot to answer for. While entertainment purveyors had been peddling the theme of "humans encounter killer animals" well before he penned Jaws in 1973, his novel and the subsequent film based on it left an indelible mark on both audiences and the world. In Jaws, audiences saw the foundations laid for what would be a legion of tropes associated with stories where nature herself (sometimes with a little help from science run amok) provides the raw materials for a good old fashioned serial killer animal tale.

Every great "animals gorging themselves on people" book/film follows the same basic setup Benchley employed in Jaws. It doesn't matter whether you're dealing with sharks, dinosaurs (Jurassic Park), killer bees (The Bees), bats (Bats), genetically-mutated creatures that defy classification (The Relic), or cockroaches (The Nest), you'll find the same framework underpinning every one.

The Nest is literally "Jaws, but with cockroaches", right down to taking place on a small island off of Cape Cod. It's a Zebra book, so I went in with expectations lower than the average winter temperature in Antarctica. Four hundred and fifty pages later, I set the book aside and began collecting my thoughts. Prior to reading The Nest, my favorite book in the 'animals behaving badly' horror library was William W. Johnstone's bat-shit (no pun intended) crazy Bats. I still think, for sheer gas factor, Johnstone's book keeps the crown. But holy crap does The Nest put up a hellacious, flesh-ripping, bone-grinding, eye-gouging battle for second place.

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The Nest opens, as every truly great horror novel of the 80's did, at a garbage dump where we learn that a switch-up in poison control methods meant to keep the rat and roach populations under control has set in motion a calamity of potentially world-ending intensity.

We're introduced to the island of Yarkie, given a history of the families who made it the place it is today thanks to their sea-faring blood, and especially to Elizabeth Carr. Back in Yarkie with her college roommate Bonnie for the summer, Elizabeth is looking forward to slowing down and relaxing in the New England atmosphere courtesy of her grandfather, Elias Johnson, a grizzled old sea captain celebrating his 75th year. Bonnie takes Elias's dog Sharky out for a walk, and that's when tragedy strikes: the dog charges into the underbrush in pursuit of something, Bonnie hears a horrible yelping. She investigates and finds Sharky, twitching on the ground in terrible pain, his eyes gouged out. Bonnie panics, runs back to Elias's house, and relates what she saw and heard. Unfortunately by the time the group goes out to bring the dog back, there's no sign of Sharky.

Suspicion soon falls upon three n'er-do-wells freshly arrived on the island wearing torn army pants, Nazi caps, and ripped shirts, but as Elias, Elizabeth, Bonnie, and the rest of Yarkie's residents discover, the newcomers have nothing to do with the horror about to unfold on the coastal New England community. At first blaming the rats, which have been displaying increasingly bizarre behavior, the islanders put out a call for assistance from the academic community. Dr. Peter Hubbard and his assistant Dr. Wanda Lindstrom catch the next ferry boat out and arrive ready to set up a lab, gather specimens, and test hypotheses. It doesn't take long for the pair to determine the rats are a mere symptom of a much larger problem: the cockroaches at the Yarkie town dump have mutated into a hive-minded group of flesh-eating, blood-drinking, fast-breeding, hissing and skittering nightmares with voracious appetites and a whole salad bar of morsels just ripe for the picking on the island.

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While it starts off with a slow build, Douglas is quick to start the body count rising, and every death is grotesquely detailed: roaches gouge out eyes, burrow into flesh, scuttle into mouths and noses and ears, strip skin and muscle, and eventually grind bones themselves to powder, leaving nothing at all behind. Just when you think Douglas can't come up with any worse scenarios for human suffering, he raises the bar once again. One of the unwritten rules of horror is that you don't kill pets, and you don't kill kids, but Douglas couldn't possibly care about your delicate sensibilities. Characters who in any other story would have script immunity are dispatched in grotesque methods chronicled unflinchingly by Douglas's omniscient narrator regardless of age, gender, level of education, or seeming importance to the story. Then, just when you think it's all over and you're wondering where he can go with the remaining fifty or so pages, Douglas springs a second surprise on readers that threatens to start the carnage all over again.

The Nest is a grim, dark, and utterly unrepentant when it comes to discomfiting the reader. You will find yourself itching unconsciously while reading it. A walk through the park is utterly out of the question. The appearance of a roach in your kitchen or house will be cause for bringing out the napalm. Douglas consulted with real-life animal biologists and etymologists to give the story as strong a scientific background as possible, and passes a plethora of disturbing (and true!) facts about roaches in general, but also bees, termites, and other creepy-crawlies, to the reader by way of Peter and Wanda's reports to the townsfolk. Just as Crichton would do with Jurassic Park a decade later, Douglas uses legitimate science to give the story a respectable backdrop, then pushes on with his hypothesis to create a truly disturbing scenario born of our worst nightmares.

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Unfortunately the scariest thing about Gregory Douglas's book of disgusting insects hell-bent on world domination is how much it will cost you to acquire your own copy. While The Nest wasn't a terribly common book, the publication of Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks From Hell last year catapulted the price of it and many other books chronicled within its pages. Just a few years ago, I plucked my copy off the shelf of a used bookstore for $3.00--today, even a run-down copy will set you back $20, with better-condition copies commanding prices of fifty, sixty, or even seventy bucks. The Nest is an absolute delight for fans of stories where animals completely own the shit out of humanity before being driven back to where they belong, but as enjoyable as the book is and has much fun as I had reading it, there's no chance in hell I'd agree it's worth these inflated asking prices. It's sad, because The Nest really is worth reading, but the newfound interest generated has put an otherwise top-tier piece of horror fiction out of reach of the very readers who would most enjoy it.

Every so often Zebra plucked something off the slush pile that didn't turn into a flaming pile of garbage. Ironically there's a point in the book where the dump (and the forest around it) are turned into a flaming pile of garbage, but this is one of the book's best scenes, taking place roughly halfway through. The Nest isn't afraid to play completely straight with its horror tropes, stars a villain which is truly repulsive under normal circumstances, and is instantly identifiable by everyone old enough to read it. If the idea of cockroaches slithering into your ears as a shortcut to your cranium doesn't give you the involuntary shivers, you may already be under the control of our new insect overlords.

Best Scene:

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If there's an iconic, stick-with-you-for-days-after-reading scene in The Nest, it involves a group of children out with the local pastor for a picnic on the sea. While the vicious storm that whips up is horrible enough in and of itself, the boat winds up crash-landing on a rocky outcrop just on the other side of the town dump. The children and the pastor all keep their heads about them and reach land in one piece...only to confront a thousands-strong surge of homicidal, blood-thirsty roaches dead-set on carving the newly-arrived morsels into dinner for the colony.

What follows is one of the roughest scenes I've ever read in a horror story, topped only by the pure ferocity of Wrath James White and the unflinching depravity of Jack Ketchum. Make sure you have a strong stomach, because it's actually worse than you're imagining. Gregory Douglas is not playing around.