BOOK REVIEW: LITTLE LUGOSI BY DOUGLAS FORD

Little Lugosi has a little bit of everything for the horror literature aficionado: body horror, sticky gore, cult insidiousness, quick pacing, and blood…lots and lots of blood. Those with delicate stomachs, take heed: the largest of terrors can hide in the smallest of companions

In his latest release, Douglas Ford returns with a creature feature centered around the most unusual of monsters: leeches and wild pigs. On the surface, the two life forms seem wildly incongruous, but Ford expertly weaves a yarn of Trevor, a university maintenance worker, his wife Madeline, a herd of aggressive swine oppressing a college campus, and a new pet that (literally) grows to become something much more in Little Lugosi, and it comes together so well, you’ll be loath to put the novella down before sailing through the story in one sitting.

When Trevor’s wife receives a package in the mail marked “For Medical Use Only,” Trevor thinks it strange, but when Madeline opens the box to reveal its contents, he is even more flabbergasted. When he first encounters the leech she ordered, he is hesitant to jump on board with the responsibilities required when owning a blood-sucking pet. “Trevor left the bubbling water and approached close enough to regard the black thing inside the container. It didn’t seem to move at first, but then he realized it was flexing itself, almost pulsing on the side of the plastic. Madeline held out the container as if she expected him to take it. ‘What do you mean by feedings?’ he asked. ‘You know what a leech eats, don’t you?’ [she said.] Trevor did. He just didn’t want to answer out loud and so let his silence say it for him. She said, ‘I have a name picked out already. Little Lugosi. I want to take him out of the container. You think it’s too soon?’ Trevor assumed she meant too soon to take him out of the container. Should it ever come out of its watery home?”

Soon, Lugosi becomes a pervasive presence in their marriage, both in and outside of their bed. Madeline repurposes a bookshelf in their living room as a kind of shrine to the miniature vampire, “his plastic container a constant fixture between the two candles she kept lit, replacing them when they burned down too low. Trevor assumed she did this because leeches liked light, or something along those lines, but Madeline drew his attention to how the flickering illumination played upon the surface of the plastic, creating an ever-present aura around the leech. ‘A sacred effect for a sacred creature,’ she said.” It is soon after this that the story really shifts into high gear, barreling headlong into transgressive horror and sailing around hairpin turns of bizarro fiction in the most disturbing ways imaginable.

Some of the more unsettling—and difficult to put down—scenes include the immediate aftermath of a hunting expedition for a white whale of a wild pig and a series of nightmares experienced by the protagonist that feature prominently a former patient of Madeline’s with a strange connection to Trevor, his wife, and their parasitic ward. The climax of the story opens with a scene of bedridden paranoia on par with Paul Sheldon’s imprisonment under the care of Annie Wilkes. “Soberly, she regarded the bloodstains on the sheets that Trevor pointed out. She said, ‘Looks to me like you’ve been coughing up blood.’ ‘Not me,’ said Trevor, his voice hoarse. ‘I’ll clean this up later. I’ll be here for a while. For you both.’ Then that half-smile again, so much like Madeline’s. ‘Stop smiling,’ Trevor said. ‘That’s not your smile.’ ‘Rest,’ she said, smiling.” The creepiness grows to an unimaginable level as Trevor sinks into an agitated fever dream of helplessness and confusion, and Ford gathers all of the breadcrumbs he’s left along the way to serve up a banquet of satisfying conclusion.
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Appearing in much of Douglas Ford’s recent fiction, Vissaria County has become the Castle Rock of Florida: like King, Ford has constructed a world in which Everyman could live and every creature imaginable might lurk. Little Lugosi has a little bit of everything for the horror literature aficionado: body horror, sticky gore, cult insidiousness, quick pacing, and blood…lots and lots of blood. Those with delicate stomachs, take heed: the largest of terrors can hide in the smallest of companions.

Review by Rebecca Rowland 

Little Lugosi: A Love Story 
by Douglas Ford

From the author of Ape in the Ring and The Reattachment comes a tale of transgressive love and unnatural birth. When Madeline senses something missing from her life with Trevor, she tries to fill the gulf between them by ordering a leech from a medical supply company. Troubled by this new pet and the special feedings it requires, Trevor must also deal with his co-worker’s Ahab-like obsession with killing a monstrous pig, a creature of myth known as “The Minister.” Finding this creature brings Trevor to a reckoning with the truth behind the arcane beliefs and practices of a lost cult, as well as the meaning behind problems much closer to home. With undertones of folk horror, Little Lugosi: A Love Story, is a bizarro odyssey of blood and other bodily fluids.

“Little Lugosi is probably the sickest leech story ever written — as hilariously wrong as you’d expect in the hands of Douglas Ford — but the premise delivers so much more. Ford’s plot is bizarrely riveting, as the author splashes as playful as a satanically-possessed piglet in the dark, bloody waters of neo-folk horror, spiraling deeper and darker than you’ll want to go, but oh you will join him in the forest of gloom. The Minister beckons…dare you pray?” — Michael Arnzen, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Play Dead and Grave Markings

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