Books: The Deading by Nicholas Belardes

My not-a-book-review book review of a debut eco-horror novel that is set in the place where I live and has lots of the things I love.

Catch The Deading author Nicholas Belardes for a book signing at Barnes & Noble in San Luis Obispo, California, on Friday, October 25th, at 4 p.m., and as a special guest reader/ lecturer at the book launch for The Amber Waves of Autumn noir anthology at the San Luis Obispo Library Community Room on Saturday, October 26th, at 6 p.m.

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INTRODUCTION

As a member of the National Book Critics Circle, with the guidance of now-NBCC-president Heather Scott Partington, and under the tutelage of authors Tod Goldberg, Mary Yukari Waters, Jill Alexander Essbaum, Deanne Stillman, and Gina Frangello, I learned how to write proper book reviews. This is not that.

You may not know this, but book reviewers follow a code of ethics based on a set of “Rules for Reviewing” established by John Updike in 1975. Updike suggested that, to maintain “a chemical purity between product and appraiser,” a reviewer should “not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like.”

I’ve written a lot of book reviews, but I want to say up front, this is not a book review. Nicholas Belardes is a friend of mine, and this is me telling you about my friend’s book and letting you know why I think you might enjoy reading it.

MY NOT-A-BOOK-REVIEW BOOK REVIEW OF THE DEADING

I finished reading The Deading last night.

The Deading is not the type of book I usually pick up—I don’t read a lot of horror. But the author is a friend of mine, and I make it a point to read my friends’ books. Also, today’s horror is not the same as yesterday’s horror. Until recently, the only horror author I’d read was Stephen King, when I was a teenager in the 1970s. But these days, I’m finding myself increasingly enamored of the genre after reading books by Stephen Graham Jones, Gabino Iglesias, Grady Hendrix, and now, Nicholas Belardes. Maybe such literary and thoughtful horror was always around, and I’m only now discovering it. Whatever the case, I’m delighting in the discovery.

The Deading is an eco-horror novel. Eco-horror examines the uneasy relationship between humans and the environment: human fears about the natural world, the impact of humans on the environment, etc. It often involves nature turning against humans. These are things I think about.

The publisher describes The Deading as “Stephen King’s Under the Dome meets The Last of Us in this harrowing dystopian novel about the downward spiral of a seaside town that becomes infected by a mysterious ocean-borne contagion.”

Here is book jacket copy for The Deading from the publisher’s website:

If you want to stay, you have to die.

In a small fishing town known for its aging birding community and the local oyster farm, a hidden evil emerges from the depths of the ocean. It begins with sea snails washing ashore, attacking whatever they cling to. This mysterious infection starts transforming the wildlife, the seascapes, and finally, the people.

Once infected, residents of Baywood start ‘deading’: collapsing and dying, only to rise again, changed in ways both fanatical and physical. As the government cuts the town off from the rest of the world, the uninfected, including the introverted bird-loving Blas and his jaded older brother Chango, realize their town could be ground zero for a fundamental shift in all living things.

Soon, disturbing beliefs and autocratic rituals emerge, overseen by the death-worshiping Risers. People must choose how to survive, how to find home, and whether or not to betray those closest to them. Stoked by paranoia and isolation, tensions escalate until Blas, Chango, and the survivors of Baywood must make their escape or become subsumed by this terrifying new normal. 

At points claustrophobic and haunting, soulful and melancholic, The Deading lyrically explores the disintegration of society, the horror of survival and adaptation, and the unexpected solace found through connections in nature and between humans.

I loved reading The Deading, but don’t just take my word for it.

The New York Times Book Review called The Deading “[d]ystopian eco-horror that perfectly balances social critique, lyricism and ghastliness. It’s a claustrophobic mosaic of a novel, and an outstanding debut.”

Electric Literature wrote that The Deading is “fantastical, and unnerving, exploring the strained relationship humans have with the natural world. A slow-burn with loads of payoff.”

Rock star horror author Stephen Graham Jones wrote: “Do not eat fish from these waters. Or oysters. Really, just stay inland. Except that, in The Deading, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re safe either.”

The Deading is set in Baywood, a small town on California’s Central Coast, sandwiched in between Morro Bay and Montaña de Oro State Park. As I read, I enjoyed recognizing places I know and love. This is one of the things I liked about the book, as a reader who lives ten miles from the setting. But I also love the way this book will allow people who don’t live in this area to get to know it and to fall in love with it. Nick’s vivid writing brings the location to life.

Nick and I write about different subject matter, and we have distinct voices and styles, but I was fascinated to see how much we have in common as writers. Mary Yukari Waters once told me to look for my writing soulmates, and I have found one in Nick. Although we are writing about them differently, we are thinking about some of the same things, and those things have become a part of our voices. I’ve never been to an oyster farm, but I’ve toured an abalone farm, and I found it horrifying. Nick and I both write fiction that engages with issues that are meaningful to us. We both love California and the things that make it unique, and setting is important to us both.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

This is a passage from my short story “Trees,” one of the stories in the linked short story collection I am querying:

“[T]he Monterey cypress is native only to the Central Coast of California …. These trees are strong and sturdy and evergreen—their leaves never die. They bear cones and the cones produce seeds and the seeds fly on the wind and reproduce wherever they might land. The Monterey cypress can live for three hundred years.”

—Leanne Phillips, “Trees”

Imagine my delight when I read this passage from Nick’s novel, The Deading:

“On a shortcut through the Preserve I spy Ingram and Victor gazing into the canopy of a Monterey cypress, a kind of coniferous evergreen with an irregular flat top. Its bright green foliage hangs with lichen. These trees only grow on the central California coast; I love their beauty, so inhale their lemony scent.”

—Nicholas Belardes, The Deading

Sure, my protagonist goes on to make thread for her job as a seamstress and to feed her baby a supper of goat’s milk, while Nick’s goes on to face a mysterious sea-snail-borne contagion and the undead, but you get the idea.

Another thing Nick and I have in common is that we weave some of the things we love into our fiction. For me, it’s music, California history, and geology. For Nick, it’s birding and the environment.

When a writer infuses their fiction with the things they are passionate about, I think it adds so much depth and texture. But it can be a challenge because of something I call the “burden of knowledge”—when you know so much about a topic, it’s hard to remember what is already common knowledge to readers and what you need to give them so that they can understand and enjoy the book. On the other hand, it’s also hard not to go overboard and to remember that what is fascinating to you may not be as fascinating to readers. Nick strikes the perfect balance, in my opinion, and impressively so—he keeps his readers in mind. He includes enough information about birding so that the reader is sufficiently informed and enjoys reading about the subject—and the bird names add to the beauty of the prose—but he doesn’t include so much information that the reader is overwhelmed, becomes disinterested, or is bored. Instead, I found myself inspired to learn more about birding, and Nick being the generous writer he is, he includes resources in the back of the book to help readers like me do so.

Although this is not a book review, I want to leave you with a passage from the book in keeping with John Updike’s Rule No. 2: “Give [the reader] enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the … reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.”

Here, get to know my favorite character in the book, the protagonist Blas, a rasquache birder who “can’t afford the tools that privilege can easily provide,”¹ and get to know a little piece of my California, too:

“He fumes about [the members of the Baywood & Friends Audobon Society] constantly, just won’t cross them, not completely anyway, won’t join them either.

“This animosity includes some of the old lady birders who have nothing better to do than wear their designer Han Solo birding vests, faces slathered in suntan lotion, fancy Nikons and Canons in hand, and shame Blas for not having a camera. So what? That’s just more rasquache birding. Blas photography 101. He holds the lends of his refurbished iPhone up to his bino lens, holds steady, prays to Huitzilopochtli for non-blur, and clickety-click goes the shutter. A few shitty images are all the evidence he needs that he’s seen a rarity. He posts them on his eBird account, then laughs at the black halo around his imperfect images of Buff-breasted Sandpipers, Tennessee Warblers, and Black-necked Stilts. He touches them all up on Instagram, doesn’t care they’re not high quality. That’s what his perfect memory is for. He can replay bird discoveries all night long while lying in bed, slipping into dreams, imagining he’s far away, maybe neck deep in a sea of spoonbills—though he’s never seen one—everything around him pink and rosy, even the sky.

“Blas loves this trail, never knows what he might find. He’s a mile in when the long, slender body of an alligator lizard darts across his path. Those back scales are reinforced by bone, just like a gator, though these creatures seem more snakelike than anything. They can be nearly a foot long from snout to tail tip. Green and yellow, it has red splotches on the middle of its back. He’s seen plenty of fence lizards lying on the trail, all different sizes too, but this is his first alligator lizard sighting here. Careful not to try to catch it, though he wants to, he knows they bite. Even though he can see its tail inches from the trail, he’s careful not to set it into its hiss-like defensive posture. Best to take long strides and leave it in the dust.

“Coon Creek Trail lies at the far southern end of Montaña de Oro, a seaside California state park just a few miles from his family’s home. Drive out Pecho Road, head south, wind up hillsides for views of the sandspit, Shark Inlet, Morro Rock, and all of Baywood. Pass through the eucalyptus of Hazard Canyon, wind through coyote bush, sage, sticky monkeyflower, and lizard’s tail, along hillside mountain bike trails, Valencia Peak, down past a beach and cove, parallel to a bluff trail, until you find yourself right where he is now. Just don’t crash into a Wild Turkey on your way. It’s a nice trek for his scooter, and either way, feels like he’s in the middle of nowhere amid bobcats, deer, mountain lions, bears, and birds. Visit on a clear winter night and the Milky Way turns sharp, pours right down the wall of heaven. Meteors and satellites pass like sparklers. Owls swoop around and around, hunting rats and snakes, maybe each other. Might even find a gray fox.”

Readers, I hope you enjoy The Deading as much as I did.

Bonus: enjoy this recent post and a new cocktail recipe inspired by The Deading over on Nick’s Substack, Underwhelmed:

October Surprises Abound

XOXO,

Leanne

1. Betty Jo Tilley, Interview with Nicholas Belardes, Kelp Journal, Issue No. 11, https://www.kelpjournal.com/post/interview-with-nicholas-belardes, accessed 10/25/2024.