Elliott Wages, struck with a fit of writer's block, takes an offer from his agent to use her lake cottage for a few Summer months while he works to complete his manuscript. Born and bred in the city, the small town of Jericho with its laid-back atmosphere should be just what he needs to get back on track with his deadline. But as you may have suspected from the cover, Jericho's got some trouble brewing in the local reservoir.
It couldn't have come at a worse time. It's September: time for the town's annual Jubilee, where rabid crowds of tourists, party-seekers, and troublemakers crowd into Jericho for an orgy of fishing, swimming, drinking, fireworks, and debauchery. The yearly influx of outside money keeps Jericho humming through the lean periods, and the town has come to depend on the annual festivities to prop up the otherwise flat economy.
Now, however, Jericho has a serious problem. Something in the lake is attacking swimmers and capsizing boats. People are going missing. Local fisherman Graham Hatcher landed a ridiculously oversize (not to mention absurdly ugly) gar pike. Could the newly-constructed Bartel plant anything to do with the bizarre odors arising from the slough? Elliott's fallen in love with Jericho (and one of its residents in particular), and his natural writer's curiosity won't be satisfied until he figures out what's causing all the trouble in Jericho's lake.
Even if it kills him.
At some point, everyone has asked the question, either mentally or out loud, but probably both: "What if William W. Johnstone, only competent?"
No? Only me?
Fine, whatever. I'm going anyway. I'm pleased as punch to discover R. Karl Largent, because if The Lake is anything to go by, then he's what you get if you take all the gun-humping, right-wing-propaganda-spewing, hellfire-and-brimstone-variant-of-Christianity-believing Patriotism(tm) away from Johnstone, and replace it with more rounded characters and a better ear for dialog.
Don't misunderstand me. I find Johnstone's books endlessly fascinating despite no Venn diagram in the world being capable of accurately depicting where he and I align in any belief system. I will continue reading and reviewing and savoring their unique breed of story until the day I can no longer see the print on the paperback pages. But you gotta want to read Johnstone, and an awful lot of his stuff comes down to pages and pages of people flapping their gums instead of actually doing anything. Johnstone was a master of the passive-voiced man of action. Sometimes his books...crawl.
Largent, on the other hand, chucks napalm on the Johnstone formula, then takes up a position and snipes everything that comes running out of the conflagration. And I'm not ashamed to admit, I had the time of my life watching him do just that. The pages in The Lake flew by at a rate which kept me reading well into the early morning, much to the chagrin of my wife who finally demanded I turn off the light so she could go to sleep. The only reason I finished The Lake several hours later than originally intended is because the bed is more comfortable than the sofa upstairs, and I had to work the next day.
The major downside to The Lake is just how misleading the cover art is. I mean, take the cover of William Schoell's Saurian, rearrange a few scales, and it sure looks like the same book:
This has "creature feature" written all over it. Actually, this is the main reason I picked it up: I plowed through Saurian so quickly I wanted a second round of killer critters munching people.
The Lake, despite what the cover wants you to think, is not that.
The closest it comes are some giant mutated lake gar that cause some damage and, yes, do gobble a couple of folks. But they're a secondary antagonist, utterly harmless as long as you stay out of the water. Sadly, giant mutated lake gar never sprout wings or flippers and go on a spawning orgy through Jericho. If this is what you're looking for, put The Lake down and, I don't know, watch Piranha II: The Spawning or something. This is an environmental disaster/technology run amok scenario crossed with aspects of Die Hard, and I highly commend Largent for his ability to keep punchy one-liners out of his point-of-view protagonist's mouth. I'm not so sure I wouldn't succumb to the temptation had I been in his shoes.
Largent liberally cribs from Jaws and every other "Nature Devours Everyone" story he can get his hands on, and it's most unfortunate that Stephen King had claimed "The Mist" and James Herbert "The Fog", because either would have been a more accurate title, and "The Vapor Cloud" just doesn't have the same punch. Also, it's nice to see that rather than a sinister corporation or some branch of the US government or military being responsible for the disaster, it's just a domino chain of bad luck that starts everything rolling and brings us a swirling miasma of flesh-melting vapors. Largent could have easily plotted out a fill-in-the-blanks story where the US military was mutating catfish to use as weapons of war or some other entertaining bullshit, but instead it's a series of unfortunate mishaps that create one colossal compounding disaster with an enormous body count.
So even though The Lake wasn't at all what I expected when I pulled it off my shelf, that actually turned out for the better. I had a blast reading it, and I'm definitely wishing I had discovered Largent two decades ago. This is William W. Johnstone, but competent, and to me, that's hella entertaining any day of the week. The Lake is four-star entertainment of the cheesiest sort.
I'm curious to read more Largent -- I want to know if The Lake was an entertaining one-off, or if he always went this balls-to-the-wall with his disaster scenarios. When I do, I'll report about it here. Until then, keep churning those pages and knocking down that TBR pile, faithful followers.