‘The Fungus’ – Harry Adam Knight

Page Count: 191 Pages

This is going to be one of those shorter posts and not just because the book isn’t a long read. Work and packing stuff (along with everything else) have combined to really get me down but this book is a good one so I couldn’t not write about it. Here goes…

When a brilliant scientist seeking to solve the problem of world hunger tries to create giant mushrooms through genetic manipulation, what could possibly go wrong?

The mutated spores escape the lab and spread across all of England. Toadstools grow to twenty feet tall, and a case of athlete's foot can mean a grisly and horrible death. But those who die quickly are the lucky ones. Those who survive infection by the fungus will be transformed into something unthinkably monstrous ...

I’ve read enough Jeff Vandermeer (the earlier stuff anyway) and seen enough clips from ‘The Last Of Us’ to know that ‘The Fungus’ would be just the book for me. Actually, thinking about it, ‘The Girl with all the Gifts’ helped make my mind up too, but anyway… Even if none of that had happened though, that blurb would have sold the book to me straight away. Toadstools growing to twenty feet tall and death by athlete’s foot… Yep, I was intrigued ;o) At only a hundred and ninety one pages long, ‘The Fungus’ absolutely fitted my ‘reading criteria’ so away I went. And I’m very glad that I did.

Harry Adam Knight (a pseudonym so I should say, John Brosnan and Leroy Kettle) clearly knew exactly what he (they) had to do on order to turn out damn near the perfect post-apocalyptic, fungal weird horror tale. Line up a few hapless victims to die in various ‘fungus-related’ ways (with a sprinkling of sex), bring in the hero of the piece in to save the day and then turn the tables on him after a journey through a landscape that’s busy getting fungal… Simple, right?

Well, Knight certainly makes it look simple and his approach is very effective; using lessons learned from the ‘James Herbert School of Killing Off Supporting Characters’ to get you interested and then hit you, at just the right moment, with some very imaginative deaths. Even when that approach concludes, Knight still gets under your skin with his ongoing commentary around the affects that the fungus is having on the countryside and the people moving through it. The plot gradually becomes more action-centric as more and more infected people show up and the result is that it’s very easy to keep reading this book, the stakes are high and the plot reflects that.

And our hero, Barry Wilson, is just the right person to hold this together. Wilson also makes a gradual transition, from frustrated writer to would be hero, that flows really smoothly and without going into it too much, he really is the only person who stands any chance of making things right. It’s a good combination and he is another reason to stick with the book, especially at the end… There’s not so much a twist, things get particularly intense and there’s a moment that will always stick with me. That’s all I’m saying.

Is ‘The Fungus’ going to change your life? Probably not but there’s a hell of a lot to get out of it and it ended up being a great way to kick back for a bit and forget about everything else. Sometimes that’s all I want and ‘The Fungus’ absolutely delivered on that score.