'Stranger Things meets World War Z in this heart-racing conspiracy thriller as a lonely young woman teams up with a group of fellow outcasts to survive the night in a town overcome by a science experiment gone wrong.
'Turner Falls is a small tourist town nestled in the hills of western Oregon, the kind of town you escape to for a vacation. When an inexplicable outbreak rapidly develops, this idyllic town becomes the epicentre of an epidemic of violence as the teenaged children of several executives from the local biotech firm become ill and aggressively murderous. Suddenly the town is on edge, and Lucy and her friends must do everything it takes just to fight through the night.'
Do big corporations in fiction ever actually do anything to help people? It seems like they don't, and they certainly don't in The Loop as a dangerous infective organism makes its way through a small American town, causing untold death and destruction.
The Loop tells the story of Lucy, a teen living in Turner Falls, Oregon. A small town that does good business as a ski-resort in the winter, the place has started to change in recent years thanks to some big corporations moving into the area. One of these is IMTECH, and they're one of the chief employers in the town, but like so many evil corporations before them, they're up to no good.
Things begin to go bad when Lucy and her classmates witness something awful in their maths class one day. One of their fellow students begins to act strange, convulsing and saying weird things, before turning horribly violent, blinding another student in one eye and viciously beating their teacher to death. Despite the awfulness of the event the town is trying to act like it was just a single horrible tragedy, but other strange things are going on too.
Luckily, Lucy is far enough removed from the popular kids to avoid much of this, instead hanging out with her best friend Bucket at the local record store, or driving around buying baked goods. Lucy and Bucket are something of outsiders, and are treated differently to most of the other people in their age group, mostly due to them being two of the only non-white kids in their school. Lucy is from Peru, but after a tragic accident that saw her lose both her parents she was adopted by a white couple in Turner Falls; whilst Bucket is originally from India, but moved to the US following a tragic event in his past.
In a setting where everyone else was white, in the kind of YA action horror setting where most protagonists would be pretty bland dark haired Caucasian kids who think of themselves as an outsider but are probably actually quite well liked it's great to see some diversity in the leads. This story could have easily been written with white leads, and other than changing some details that don't hugely effect the narrative it would probably have played out very similar, but Jeremy Robert Johnson went out of his way to not just include some diversity, but put it centre stage.
Whilst things begin fairly slowly, spending time establishing the world of Turner Falls and giving you a chance to get to know it's main characters, when things really begin in earnest it changes the whole tone and pace of the book. It goes from a slowly unfolding mystery centred around these teens to a non-stop fight for survival, and there are few chances for the characters or readers to stop and catch their breath once the terrible events of the night start.
Jeremy Robert Johnson doesn't have an easy job with this book, not only does he have to make you care for the characters, even the ones we don't meet until later in the book, but he has to do all that whilst keeping the pace going and piling on the tension. I don't often like using this term to describe books, but it really does feel like a roller-coaster ride. There's the slow build, the ramping up of tension, and once you reach a certain point it hits the high speed, it throws you around and scares you, throwing shocks and jolts at you along the way, before coming in for an ending that will leave you stunned and breathless.
The book is also pretty violent, and has some intense scenes that I know horror fans are going to enjoy, along with the body horror that pervades the whole thing. There are moments that feel incredibly brutal, and Jeremy Robert Johnson doesn't shy away from the brutality of having ti fight for your survival. The book doesn't make action scenes into something designed to wow you, it's not the kind of story where people are taking punches and are able to to keep going. Instead, it's a book that demonstrates how brutal violence can be, and how fragile the human body is. Sadly, this does mean that people die throughout the book, and you're going to end up seeing characters that you care about suffer and even die. As such, it's not a book I'd reccomend to the faint of heart, and if you need to take some breaks to get through it all that's completely understandable; because it's a pretty intense ride.
The Loop is a book that I think is going to take a lot of people by surprise, because it's a lot of very different things. If you come to the book wanting a funny coming-of-age story you're going to get that, but you're also going to get heart pounding tension. If you're looking for edge of your seat thrills and shocking horror moments that's definitely here, but there's also a lot of heart, and moments of social commentary around things like race and class. It's a book that fits into so many different genre's, that draws elements from such a broad spectrum that it feels unique and new. In a world where so many YA books seem to deliver variations on the same kinds of settings and characters it's so refreshing to get something so completely different.
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