It is axiomatic of modern life that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, as the old aphorism goes. To say that THE CORRODING plays on that thought is like saying that snow is white, or that pride precedes a fall. Ty Tracey’s sprawling horror novel combines the best features of a Stephen King story with the cool, clinical narrative chops of a Michael Crichton novel to create an eerily compelling tale of paranormal foreboding and terror. Following a strange discovery in the depths of a salt mine, a series of inexplicable events starts to occur – strange, transient fires in the skies; a seemingly sentient rat that murders innocent people; a series of murders that are gruesome even for the standards of the genre – alternating against the backdrop of a breaking down of law and order and the loss of the great and the good in society to violent, mystifying deaths. Before long, this unnerving phenomenon worsens, and the whatever-it-is that is causing it begins to actively protect killers and psychopaths while laying waste to everything and everyone around them.

Tracey has a steely grasp of exposition, and when the requirements of the plot threaten to overburden the reader with technical details that characters would not normally discuss because they would already be aware of them – two grad students and a professor outlining the workings of a supercomputer they are intimately familiar with, for example – Tracey solves the problem via some elegant lampshading. His circle of around half a dozen main characters include computer scientists, crime scene investigators, and mathematicians – Tracey has a fascination with high achievers, and there are some stereotypes here, but Tracey is aware of them; FBI agent Lori Cruz is actively compared to Dana Scully and Clarice Starling – several of whom expatiate the doomed nature of humanity. To underline the point, Tracy introduces the New Knights of Solomon – a shadowy, quasi-religious group who take advantage of the culling of society’s thinkers and doers to advocate for their idiosyncratic view of order to a cowed population. Add into the mix some deft crime procedural material, cutting commentary on the immorality of obscene wealth and the breakdown of the social contract, and a psychopathic, incorporeal serial killer that puts one in mind of nothing so much as an entity from the Backrooms, and the result is a heady, swirling read. THE CORRODING’s bleak perspective is a reflection of the tumult that every person with any self-possession feels on beholding the state of the world, but it is also haunted by the harrowing, sneaking suspicion that somehow, the human race deserves it.

Combining elements of murder mystery, body horror, and near-future apocalyptic scenarios, Ty Tracey’s THE CORRODING is a haunting, terrifying indictment of humanity in the technological age.

~Craig Jones for IndieReader