When a cleanup crew find a patch of radioactive orange muck alongside a forrest stream, readers immediately know what’s going to happen in Terror at Back Woods Lodge by Eddie Generous—there’s gonna be one or two mutated beasties causing trouble before the novel ends. And just like the berserker bear-thing from the 1979 movie Prophecy, the creatures will be insatiable with unbounded toxic rage.  

The story begins in 1911 but quickly jumps to the mid-90s, a time when people are obsessed with the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Generous uses the trial as a timestamp for his story, but nothing more substantial. His attempt to connect the dots between O.J. and one of his characters is half-baked at best. 

Tracey and Luna have mortgaged their future by turning an old, abandoned lodge in the Vancouver woods into a retreat for divorced artists. This kooky business plan makes sense to Tracey. “Divorce works just like shining a light on plants,” she explains. “The plants are free to grow, to breathe, to bloom and that often happens through art.”

Everything’s going great at first. Each morning artist-in-residence Paul Webster takes his students on field trips while teaching them about craft and creative expression. Mostly, his enthusiastic lectures sound like freshman-level RISD pep talks, but his heart’s in the right place. No one disagrees when he says “art doesn’t have to be what the world expects of it.”   

The idyllic artistic getaway soon becomes the hunting ground for a 15-foot-tall rat walking on two legs. It’s a rat but also decidedly un-rat-like, says the author. It actually resembles both a rat and a bear and maybe even a man. To quote one of the early victims: “It’s a monster! A real-life monster! It’s a fucking monster!!”

One by one, the artists-in-attendance are killed and chewed up like a wad of Big League Chew bubblegum. In a bold twist, Generous even kills the hero of his damn story. The death scene is so unexpected, I had to read it twice (maybe three times) before it sank into my thick skull. 

What happens in the end is a total scream (in a good way). I can’t say anything specific or the spoiler police will destroy me on social media. But suffice to say, the author is able to cross the finish line in the most monsterific way possible. Good job. 

[ Terror at Back Woods Lodge / By Eddie Generous / First Printing: October 2024 / ISBN: 9781998763443 ]