The Nest
I'm sorry, Gregory A. Douglas, but this is very nearly the worst piece of writing I've ever stumbled upon. Your book isn't quite up to the standards of The Eye of Argon, but it's certainly in the vicinity. If your premise isn't bad enough ("It was an ordinary Cape Cod town — until the huge mutants began to leave their nest…"), then perhaps the acknowledgements make up for it: "Thanks are due to novelist Eli Cantor for suggesting that an island could be as terrorized by an invasion of mutant insects as by killer sharks off its beaches."
Fortunately, "Any resemblance to place, incident, or characters living or dead, is unintended and purely coincidental." Otherwise, I might have to desert this reality in chagrin at its amazingly bad plot.
The prose is amazing. Here's my favorite excerpt: "The vermin were squealing with agony as they sprang into the night air. Their writhing bodies were as bizarre as their gyrations and screaking; they were covered not with fur, but with what seemed to be shells, scintillating in the moonlight. The pinpricks of fire on their rodent bodies flashed crazily over the dump with a metallic sheen until there was a quick change to the crimson of blood. The rats were cloaked in sequins of death; a nightmare scene out of an animal hell."
"Routine poisons normally controlled the noxious creatures everyone knew and tacitly accepted as living in the dump. Warfarins held the inevitable rat population in check, and the cockroach broods were standardly contained by pyrethrum and sodium fluoride. Since the prevailing southwest winds carried the stench conveniently out to sea, it was easy for the dump–out of sight and smell of Yarkie's homes–to remain out of mind.
"Thus, no one marked, suspected, or theorized about the slithering mass of preternatural life seething through the stinking intercises. No one considered or remarked that conditions were ideal for breeding in geometric multiplication. For cockroaches, particularly, the ever-enlarging dump was a great progenitive womb–warm, fetid, moist, with food so cornucopianly plentiful that everything crawling, creeping, and scurrying through the foulness could gorge to satiation."
Ahhhhh. "Sequins of death"; "cornucopianly plentiful"; "breeding in geometric multiplication." The perfect example of a bad writer armed with the twin folly of a dictionary and thesaurus. The best 25 cents my mother ever spent.
My advice to you, Mr. Douglas? Practice using the small words first. Then maybe we'll let you at some of the less ornery three-syllablers.
