For the first third of Wanderers, it seems like this is a fairly straight forward mystery: what is making seemingly healthy, random people rise from their beds and sleepwalk in a group across America? They have no uniting characteristics and no history of sleepwalking. They cannot be stopped or else they heat up and literally explode (it’s as gross as you imagine). They do not eat, defecate, speak, or even blink. Syringes cannot pierce their skin. They move in tandem silently, like a school of fish. Just, downright… weird! The CDC brings back a disgraced scientist to lead the investigation in the sleepwalker phenomenon because… a cutting-edge AI supercomputer told them to. Hmm.. that sounds a bit fishy, doesn’t it?
As the story progresses, we follow as the ‘flock’ of wanderers grows. We meet their ‘shepherds’, family or friends of those taken up who follow the flock and care for their charges (which generally just amounts to brushing their hair and feeling helpless). As the flock grows, tensions rise. A small-town preacher decides to equate the flock to the End of Days and is rapidly elevated to national-doomsayer-celebrity status. A certain gun-toting subsection plans attacks on the flock that are narrowly thwarted. A random aging rock sensation joins the spectacle, using the flock to get his time in the limelight (and unwittingly getting drawn into feeling actual empathy for the first time in his vacuous life).
So at the 1/3 mark of this novel, something else – seemingly unconnected – starts to unfurl. An incident at the ground-breaking of a new amusement park sees a bat colony displaced and ripped through the nearby crowd. People are scratched but nothing much more comes of it… that is, if you ignore the Walt-Disney stand-in who seems to be losing his grip on reality. In the months that follow the unfortunate bat incident, this larger-than-life theme park mogul becomes withdrawn, aggressive, reckless. He develops cold-like symptoms that he cannot shake. And by the end of his life, he’s wandering himself – not with the flock, but through the swamps of Florida, sneezing white powder and hallucinating. When his body is found, it’s covered in a fine white mold with fleshy tubers reaching upwards, empty sacks from spores hanging limply….
I won’t spoil any plot details from here.
Putting aside a few minor quibbles (was the aging Rockstar really necessary??), this was an engaging read, if a bit long.
3 Wormwood Comets out of 5
