Synopsis:
Stranger Things meets World War Z in The Loop, as a lonely young woman teams up with a group of fellow outcasts to survive the night in a town overcome by a science experiment gone wrong.
Turner Falls is a small tourist town nestled in the hills of western Oregon. The kind of town you escape to for a vacation. When an inexplicable outbreak rapidly develops, this idyllic town becomes the epicenter of an epidemic of violence as the teenage children of several executives from the local biotech firm become ill and aggressively murderous. Suddenly the town is on edge, and Lucy and her friends must do everything it takes just to fight through the night.
Edition:
E-book from Net Galley. But I also own the hardcover with signed bookplate (which I believe came from a past Night Worms package)
Disclaimer:
Since I did have a review copy, consider this the standard disclaimer. It was received for review purposes, and that this did not in any way effect my review.
Awards/Nominations:
- Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Horror (2020)
My Thoughts:
My Goodreads notes while reading this should give you an idea of the type of book The Loop is:
‘WTF Oregon why u so crazy?‘
and
‘Well, holy shit.’
The story centers around Lucy and Bucket. They’re the only two students of color in their Podunk little town’s Podunk little high school. If you’ve ever been to Oregon, you’d probably recognize the believability of this. Get 4 feet outside the metro areas and it’s pretty much just an endless sea of white faces and Vidalia onions. Clearly I’m grossly over-simplifying, but you get my point, yes?). They find themselves in the center of a huge conspiracy perpetrated by IMTECH, the local biotech conglomerate.
“They rename you ‘test subject’ or ‘enemy,’ or they assign you a race or a nation or a class—and then they don’t have to think about you anymore.”
If I’ve learned anything in my 35 years, it’s that you should definitely always trust biotech firms. Always.
You know, movies like these:
Wait, is that right? It’s right, isn’t it? Definitely nothing problematic will result from fucking around with any of the potentially sketchy aspects of biotech… All will end well.
Obviously that is incredibly not true.
See, in The Loop, like in life, it’s all fine and dandy until some asshole decides that making Scrooge McDuck money is more important than the human lives. I’m not going to tell you what’s going on here, because I’m not a Spoiler Blog, but suffice to say shit is fucked up.
And Lucy is a really wonderful, nuanced character. Honestly this whole book just reads a like a really action packed, scary sci-fi movie. It’s perfectly paced, there’s a lot of tense, scary scenes, and it’s just a hell of a good time. I can see why this was nominated for a Goodreads Choice Awards. This one definitely deserves all the hype.
About the Author:
(from the author’s website)
Jeremy Robert Johnson is the author of the critically-acclaimed collection ENTROPY IN BLOOM as well as the breakthrough cult novel SKULLCRACK CITY. His fiction has been praised by The Washington Post and Publishers Weekly, authors such as David Wong, Chuck Palahniuk, and Jack Ketchum, and has appeared internationally in numerous anthologies and magazines. In 2008 he worked with The Mars Volta to tell the story behind their Grammy Winning album The Bedlam in Goliath. While in 2010 he spoke about weirdness and metaphor as a survival tool at the Fractal 10 conference in Medellin, Colombia. In 2017 his short story “When Susurrus Stirs” was adapted for film and won numerous awards including the Final Frame Grand Prize and Best Short Film at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival. He is repped by Mollie Glick (Literary) and Jon Cassir (Book-to-Film) at CAA, and is at work on a host of new books.
Rating:
It’s fast paced, it’s a lot of fun, and it will intermittently have you shouting, “what the fuck?!”
The Loop By Jeremy Robert Johnson Gallery / Saga Press Published: September 29, 2020 ISBN: 9781534454293 Format: Hardcover, E-book, Audiobook Paperback coming May 2021 320 Pages
YESSSS! This is a WILD read. This was my last read of 2020, and boy what a book to finish the year with!
Yeah, as someone who lives in the state this takes place in, I just have to say: I can see it.