Detective Vicky Paterson has seen more than her fair share of murders in the town of Fort Halcott, New York. But this one is the strangest yet, an unnerving ritualistic killing of a woman with hoarding disorder discovered amid the already horrific backdrop of her home. Meanwhile, hot on the trail of a missing girl, professional fixers Will and Alicia stumble on another disturbing ritual in an abandoned factory that seems to stretch the boundaries of what is possible. Vicky is ready to blame her case on a potential serial killer; Will and Alicia are willing to call the ritual nothing more than the work of a deranged sex cult. But both investigations stumble to a halt when the world erupts in a cicada emergence of biblical proportions. Far from the harmless, droning creatures one would expect, these cicadas are driven to attack, forcing themselves down humans’ throats and taking residence there. As people everywhere fight to survive, Vicky, Will and Alicia begin to wonder: How is this infestation related to their cases? And how can they ever hope to stop a swarm so immense?
Even if they lack the drive to infest and kill, a cicada emergence can feel like an invasion. The Swarm, Andy Marino’s latest horror novel, pulls on this thread and amplifies it. Marino turns cicadas’ already otherworldly drone into a malevolent force, their haphazard way of flying into a learning algorithm bent on human destruction. While that premise might seem hokey to anyone who has spent time around harmless, bumbling cicadas, in execution, it is anything but. Marino’s insects are horrifying, alien creatures with unshakable drives and unknowable goals. And they don’t just come in ones and twos. In the tradition of Hitchcock’s seminal classic The Birds, the cicadas of The Swarm are inescapable, blotting out the sky in great streams of wings and writhing masses of bodies. Marino balances this ecological horror with a sympathetic look at a cast of characters whose lives were already on the brink far before the cicada emergence. Sometimes gruesome and always creepy, The Swarm rides the balance between good horrific fun and grisly speculation.