I obtained this book at a library book sale with the cover above, after getting a deliberately vague rec from
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sovay. It is currently in print, in both paper and ebook form, but very frustratingly, both the cover and blurb of the new edition give away the premise, which in the book you don't learn until about a quarter of the way - and it's much more fun to find out for yourself. Written in 1958, the novel at first appears to be a post-war spy thriller with a noir tone. Something mysterious but probably bad is going down in Russia; British spies are looking into it; a man is called away from his wife and peaceful life due to his expertise in chemical warfare. But when a British boat is wrecked by a Russian naval vessel and its crew are washed ashore, the book takes a sudden, chilling turn into horror. What sort of horror? We don't know. It has a Charles Fort feel, with inexplicable terrors and mysteries hovering just out of sight.
I can't say more without spoilers, and I am deeply annoyed at how difficult it is to read the book unspoiled as it's very pleasingly cross-genre and odd. The horror elements do come into clear focus, but never quite clear enough to lose their essential fear of the unknown and the unknowable.
I quite enjoyed this weird little book, with its dour and cynical tone, atmosphere of existential dread, and unexpected amount of agency on the part of its female characters, and was pleased to see that Blackburn has written many other books. I'm going to attempt to dive into them knowing nothing.
The premise is fungus. Fungal spores which only infect women (this part is never really explained, but is not done in a sexist manner) are drifting from Russia - something which Russia is also panicked about. It all comes back to Nazis. There's a good twist, which I did guess but that was because the book played fair and dropped clues.
So, Nazis, Cold War, spies, fungus zombies: four great tastes that go great together! The combination sounds over the top and cheesy, but it's written as a tense, spooky thriller; it's not as good as Ira Levin or John Le Carre, but just in terms of tone meeting content, it's much more like those two collaborated than like the melodramatic gorefest one might expect from Nazi fungus.
The writing is sometimes very striking. Here's two bits from the climax:
And then it was over. She didn't just die. There was no time for dying. Her end had nothing to do with the conventional idea of death. She was just there one moment and then not there. There was simply nothing of her there. Nothing left of her. Nothing that could even be called a part of her. There was just stuff on the floor and the walls, and that was all there was.
Coming across the room, vast, monstrous, deadly, but still incredibly sad. Its smell was all around it as it came, the fresh, sad, haunting smell of hay, as it came over him. Came over with its no face above him and its no eyes looking at him and its no arms reaching for him.
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I'm so glad it worked out, and so disappointed in the reprint! I have the edition you picture, which does not give away the game straight off. I got it from
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Awesome!
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My guess from the title was phosgene (😬) or possibly coumarin...
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