The Devil’s Fingers by Hunter Shea is next in the One Size Eats All series. Autumn Winters and her friends have gone on a camping outing in a parkland forest near Merritt Lake. Out hiking, they stumble into a meadow of weird looking plants with grotesque tentacles. When disturbed by Autumn, a budding botanist, the freaky fungi release a horrid stench akin to an abattoir. The reeking odor is enough to cause the campers to pass out. Autumn identifies the shroom colony as Clathrus acheri, also known as octopus stinkhorn and devil’s fingers. Though the invasive fungi look like something alien, Autumn says they are harmless to humans. If only that were so…
Carrie and Dan are the first to succumb, becoming hosts to devil’s finger eggs. Efforts to escape the forest and get help fail, and one by one the group falls prey to the relentless mushroom invasion. Their private horror intensifies when a Scout group wanders into their camp, all of whom are infected. Autumn and Brandon, the two still most cogent of events, realise that the group cannot continue to the trailhead, or they risked spreading the contagion. And yet, despite their best efforts, the determined fungus may have found an escape after all.
This OSEA book is probably my most favourite so far. I absolutely devoured it. I find mushrooms and their roles in the ecosystem fascinating. That some species can infect living beings and zombify them equally intrigues and horrified me. None currently affect humans, but it is a perfectly plausible concept. I was unfamiliar with these types of mushrooms, and so of course I had the look them up. Dude, wtf? Just wtf? I’d probably pee my pants if I came across a whole field of these buggers without any idea what they were.
Devil’s Fingers felt like an episode of The X-Files. It’s not as if special shrooms are a something new to the FBI partners, though more of it reminded me of the ‘Darkness Falls’ episode with the carnivorous bioluminescent mites. Using mushrooms made things twice as creepy. Animals, even lizards and snakes, can exhibit some intelligence and awareness, can react in a familiarisation to contact with humans. They might not care about the humans, and only see us as food, but they do see us. Plants, mushrooms, virii- all these things have such vastly different perceptions than we do. Rather than being live prey, we are just part of the ecosystem, and just tools of convenience to them.
Autumn ends up having make some pretty harsh choices once most of the group became infected. She was the first to realise the need for quarantine and argued hard for it. As things grow worse, she’s the one who has to enforce it. I’d like to think in similar survivor situation, I could make the best choices, the logic over the emotion, to protect the greater number of people. Like that Star Trek saying…
The ending did feel a bit abrupt to me, but ended in perfect horror fashion. That also reminded me of several X-File endings, where you know the horror is still out there, waiting patiently. Not to mention the potential government or agency conspiracy with chemtrails. The thought that this was a sanctioned biological experiment is truly terrifying. The final twist, the dubious immunity, was great! Loki-level irony.
***Many thanks to the Netgalley and Kensington Publishing for providing an egalley in exchange for a fair and honest review. Reviewed for Silver Dagger Tours.
