Right from the beginning of Tick Town, a fun new creature feature from author Christopher A. Micklos, I knew I would fall in love with the character of Emmaline Blackdeer. As a cub reporter for the Tomahawk Hollow Gazette, her enthusiasm for the tenets of journalism warmed my cold heart. 

She didn’t care that traditional media like newspapers and magazines were dying. To Emmaline, being a reporter was a sacred civic responsibility—journalism was her superpower. 

With that power, she was able to save her small Wisconsin hometown from an attack of mutant ticks (sort of). Believe me, the entire townlet of Tomahawk Hollow would have been sucked dry in seconds if the sheriff or the mayor had anything to say about the situation. 

It was Emmaline who was able to connect the dots between a rash of recent deaths and the old abandoned pesticides factory at the edge of town. Even though it seemed preposterous that an infestation of giant bloodsucking arachnids were marching toward Main Street, her nose for news uncovered the truth (and lies) of the escalating emergency.  

It started one night when a couple of lovebirds died from exsanguination in the woods. “Rarely does anyone die from tick bites,” said a baffled  arachnologist, “and no tick on earth was big enough to suck all of the blood from a human corpse.”

Little did the acarology expert know how wrong she truly was. These mutants were big. Really big. Tens of thousands of times bigger than any tick ever seen before. They could easily suck the blood out of a stone. 

The town’s municipality immediately fell mute. The mayor, in particular, didn’t want any bad publicity to affect the upcoming Harvest Moon Jubilee. Newspaper reports of giant mutant ticks would undoubtedly affect the celebration’s attendance. 

Emmaline didn’t care about the success or failure of the upcoming Jubilee—she had to warn her friends and neighbors about the monster invasion. And when she was done with that, she had to find a way to defeat a group of shady mercenaries whose mission was to nuke Tomahawk Hollow back to the Stone Age. 

Events coalesce and escalate quickly in Tick Town, but the author found time to include some nice personal moments here and there. For example, one satisfying subplot concerned the complicated romantic history of Emmaline and the town’s chief of police. 

The best sub-narrative in the novel involved the two fathers of the young lovers killed at the beginning of the novel. Although the men didn’t like each other very much, they deeply loved their children. Together, they scoured the woods each day, hoping to find their missing kids, and the search became a profound bonding experience. Their novel-ending bromance was a sweet way to bring the story to a close. 

[ Tick Town / By Christopher A. Micklos / First Printing: June 2025 / ISBN: 9798991785549 ]