Wormfood

Creative cursing and caricatures are all this soi-disant horror novel has to offer readers. While driving a truck for his hillbilly friends so they can moon the funeral procession of a prominent and hated local rancher, scrawny, shy Arch Turner accidentally knocks the casket into an irrigation ditch, and the corpse releases an infestation of foot-long wormlike creatures that slowly kill from the inside out. The ensuing havoc includes infected cheeseburgers, a lot of shotgun ammo, two very angry elderly women, one dazzling belt buckle, and a ton of blood. Jacobson’s attempt at a cheesy B-movie on paper has plenty of colorful stereotypes, vulgar language, and truly disgusting descriptions of the damage wrought by the worms on human and bovine bodies, but it’s short on the actual scares. (July)