The Nest by Gregory A. Douglas

Get ready to bug out!

Everyone has a hangup about some kind of creepy-crawly or another, right?

Arachnophobia is so commonplace it’s one of the few phobias that everyone actually knows the name of.

Wasps, ants, and mosquitos are all universally disliked — especially when they encroach on what we regard as our turf.

But if you had to pick just one bug that virtually everyone agreed was public enemy number one, it’d have to be the humble cockroach.

People far and wide are disgusted by the cockroach. And rightly so! They’re known for spreading diseases and other nasty germs. They look dirty and greasy, and they race around in a skittish unpredictable fashion. They’re also synonymous with dark, dank conditions — be that a trash dump or a crack in the wall behind your kitchen cabinets.

Yep, of all the insect kingdom, cockroaches take the throne when it comes to the species that can most easily gross us humans out. Cockroaches have therefore been widely used in popular culture to invoke fear and disgust. (A personal favorite is the classic X-Files episode, War of the Coprophages.)

But we’re here today to talk about The Nest, a novel in which an isolated island community off the coast of Cape Cod is overrun with an infestation of not just mutant cockroaches far larger than your normal kind, but murderous cockroaches that have developed a highly-evolved hive mind so that they operate in the same manner as a colony of ants: working together as one to accomplish a common goal.

In this case, killing all humans.

A small group of locals made up of the sheriff and what qualifies as town elders on an island populated by hardy old fishermen call in a couple of scientists from the mainland to get to the bottom of this plague and, hopefully, put an end to it.

What you’re imagining in your head right now is exactly what this book delivers. Gross-out bloody gore aplenty.

And you’ll likely be pleased to know that Douglas delivers when it comes to graphic depictions of these vicious vermin attacking their prey, eating through eyeballs and cramming their way inside all manner of orifices.

Your skin will crawl reading this novel.

But this isn’t just some trashy paperback from hell, it’s actually a damn good book. The human characters are remarkably three-dimensional, and you come to genuinely care about them and be moved by their plight as the story zigzags from one moment of terror to the next.

Because no-one is guaranteed safety in The Nest. You might sometimes think that the story is headed in a particular direction, only to have the rug pulled out from underneath you the next.

And that’s not easy.

In a movie, for example, it’d be quite acceptable to merely deliver upon the audience’s most basic expectations given the logline and everyone would go home perfectly satisfied. But this thriller goes above and beyond the low-hanging fruit it promises. The result is a suspenseful tale of horror that keeps you guessing and rooting for the core group of characters who go mano a mandible with these pernicious pests.

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