DARKNESS, DARKNESS: Forever Twilight: Book One

Zombie monsters struck from the mold of countless drive-in B movies supply mayhem and gore in this first volume of a projected SF-horror series. Their onslaught is heralded one day by a predawn flash of unearthly light that cuts off middle-American everyville Jesman's Bend from communication with the outside world. When four employees of local radio station KMRT investigate, they find the town mysteriously depopulated, apparently in the middle of regular morning routines. Familiar folk reappear shortly afterward, all wearing concealing sunglasses and gloves and driven by malignant alien motives revealed when they descend en masse upon the terrified foursome. British author Crowther (The Longest Single Note) evokes a range of creepy cinema classics, including Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Night of the Living Dead to set his story's mood. What he doesn't do is provide much of a plot, opting instead to pad the slim narrative with drawn-out scenes of the splattery siege of the radio station. By the novel's end, it's still not clear what has caused the weird transformation of the town's citizens and why the heroes have been spared. "We need to find out what's happening, why it's happening and what we can do about it," says one of the survivors in the closing paragraphs. Had Crowther dropped a few illuminating clues along the way, this book might have seemed more a self-contained novel than just a pulpy preamble to a work in progress. (Sept.)