The Monsters of Ohio

Richland, Ohio is a town on its last legs. With Bradson Foods—its biggest employer—about to close, the community is quietly unraveling. Dave Prost serves as both chief of police and sole police officer. Mike Boyd, recently laid off from the FDA, returns home to stay with his dad and stepmother and immediately senses that something is deeply off about the place he grew up. Meanwhile, a local woman named Andi hatches a plan to revive the town’s fortunes: a festival celebrating Ohio’s legendary cryptids, dubbed the Monster Mash. It’s eccentric, but it might just work—until the missing-pet flyers start appearing, and a cow that should be dead turns up alive and somewhat abnormal. One by one, other animals follow. Then the people start changing, too, in ways that are difficult to explain and horrifying to witness. Scalzi builds a quietly devastating portrait of rural decline and populates it with a cast that feels genuinely real—ordinary people blindsided by the extraordinary. The horror creeps in slowly before going full throttle, and the author never loses his grip on the humor that keeps things from becoming relentlessly bleak. Think Twilight Zone by way of The Thing: unsettling, darkly funny, and impossible to put down.—Jeff Ayers