By CHRISTOPHER A. MIKLOS (Castle Bridge Media; 2025)

If lines like, “The decisive blast slammed into the monster’s face, which at near point-blank range exploded in a grisly splatter of tick goo,” resonate with you (as they do me) then TICK TOWN is the book to read. It’s a no-frills updating of the “nasties” horror fiction model of the 1970s and 80s, when authors like James Herbert, Guy N. Smith and Shaun Hutson wrote about killer bugs, rodents and crustaceans.

Yuk.

Those authors, of course, were/are British, and one of Miklos’s major feats was the successful relocation of this material to an American milieu. Specifically, the secluded Wisconsin community Tomahawk Hollow, where, as was often the case with these types of novels, a horny couple are interrupted, permanently, in their nighttime revelries by an unseen something.

It seems Tomahawk Hollow is infested by mutant ticks the size of desks. Ticks of course don’t actually grow that large, but it seems a pesticide production plant has been engaging in questionable experimentation, leading to numerous animal killings in addition to the unfortunate couple who got it in the opening pages.  he local newspaper reporter Emmaline grows increasingly suspicious as more people meet horrific ends, with the ticks growing increasingly aggressive.

The aptly named Mayor Cankerby wants the news of the ticks’ handiwork hushed up, as a Harvest Moon Jubilee festival is coming up that promises to draw thousands of people.  To deal with the critters Cankerby recruits a band of German mercenaries, but even these hard asses are no match for the bugs.

There’s a discreet romance between Emmaline and Police chief Donovan, but it isn’t belabored.  Miklos keeps things lean and compact in terms of prose, plotting and page length (186), with a suitably splat-happy climax that comes complete with a digital countdown.

TICK TOWN is fun, pure and simple, with Miklos whole-heartedly providing all the things we want from a book like this one—namely blood, slime and bugs galore. There’s also an unobtrusive but quite overt sense of humor, evident in passages like the one in which Mayor Cankerby ponders the identity of a dead child, hoping it was sired by a tourist rather than a local, because, “That would sting just a little less.”