MELLON FOLLY AND THE INFINITE RETREAD: HUNTER SHEA’S MISFITS
MISFITS by Hunter Shea, published by Flame Tree Press
T
he youth do a lot of the heavy lifting in horror fiction. When monsters roll into town, they’re the only ones to send evil packing. Hunter Shea’s latest novel, Misfits,is the story of one such group of teens fighting creatures that live on the outskirts of their small suburb. Set in the 90s in a small Connecticut town, Misfits’s motley crew of flannel-wearing, grunge-blasting friends face evil head on after one of their own is brutally assaulted. In an act of revenge, they feed the man responsible to a family of inbred mutants known as the Melon Heads, but even righteous actions can have consequences.
“During the height of the 90s grunge era. . .” is how the synopsis on the back of Misfits starts, leading readers to believe that they’re about to take a deep dive into a dark 90’s period piece filled with teenage angst, rampant drug use, monsters and a hell of a lot of fuzz pedals. The result though is less Kids meets The Hills Have Eyes featuring a soundtrack by Soundgarden and more like the characters from Air Heads stumbled onto the set of Gummo. Shea wants the reader to feel immersed in the 90s, but does little work to establish the setting—a quick reference to Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” doesn’t earn the hyperbolic ad copy either—and while there’s no reason to smother the story with references, the overall 90s feeling of Misfits is the equivalent of putting a flannel shirt on a skeleton and calling it a day.
Shea spends the first few chapters painting the town and his characters with broad strokes. However, unlike King’s Derry, Maine, which is fully realized no matter what era he sets the story in, Shea’s Milbury is more like the model home version of a town complete with mannequins meant to show you what it could look like rather than what it is—it could be your town, my town or a phony Hallmark town. It doesn’t really matter though because one gets the impression that in addition to creating his own 99 Cent Store Losers club, Shea is trying to utilize the trope of aloof parents that ignore the evil the kids are facing off with, which works fine when the antagonist is a supernatural entity that can do whatever it wants, but when the bad guys are mutants smashing up the town it becomes a lot harder to buy into.
The shallow world building also extends to Shea’s characters that are defined by their archetypical characteristics. Chuck is a towering intellectual, making him the stock gentle giant. Heidi and Vent are kind, a little naïve and helpful. Mick is your bad boy aggressor and Marnie, well . . . is a shyer version of Heidi. If these traits were only a piece of the teens’ complex personalities then it wouldn’t be such an issue, but in a book that’s pushing three hundred pages, a book that really wants you to give a damn, it works against itself.
There’s a larger issue here, though, and it has to do with Marnie’s character. It’s inarguable that she suffers the most horrific act of the book, but by the end we’ve spent more time focusing on Mick’s terrible stepdad and Chuck’s fear of never getting into a good college. The rape is nothing more than a plot device meant to get them to the Melon Heads and once this happens there’s almost zero exploration of Marnie post-assault. She obsesses over her inability to have children and the physical pain she’s in, but before we move beyond that and see how her character changes as a result of the traumatic attack, the novel ends. This hamstrings Marnie’s arc and really takes the focus away from the one character this book should be paying the most attention to. Shea makes a half-hearted attempt to shine a positive light on her situation in a jarring epilogue, but it comes across as lazy and only highlights the fact that her brutalization was really just to get from one narrative point to another.
To Shea’s credit, it was refreshing that he used the obscure legend of the Melon Heads instead of rehashing Sasquatch or the Loch Ness Monster. This group of forest-dwelling monsters are either the offspring of escaped mental patients or the unfortunate result of inbreeding and mad science. He provides a slightly muddy history, which works because the Melon Head lore changes depending on where you are geographically. Plus it allows the reader to ponder, maybe do a little research and make their own conclusions. Not everything needs to be explained all the time and by doing it this way, we’re able to make up our own horrific possibilities of where the Melon Heads come from and what they’re really capable of. That said, it would’ve been nice to see some juxtaposition between the misfits and the Melon Heads—two groups ignored and viewed as a threat to polite society, but one is actually quite dangerous.
It should also be said that while Misfits is lacking in a lot of what it sets out to do, Shea’s no slouch when it comes to creating atmosphere and tension. The entire kidnapping where they take Marnie’s assaulter into the woods to meet his fate is well-crafted and expertly builds up to the gory money-shot many readers will no doubt come looking for with a book like this.
With the popularity of Stranger Things and the recent IT films, there’s an audience for solid period pieces that give us a close examination of those times, but Misfits exists in a space where it does little to satisfy those hungry for nostalgia and isn’t thoughtful or dark enough to satisfy readers looking for an authentic recreation of the 90s that could stand alongside Poppy Z. Brite’s Exquisite Corpse or Caitlin R. Kiernan’s Silk—it also doesn’t add any new flavor to the overused recipes its cooking with. However, keeping in mind the formulaic approach and roughly sketched characters, the novel does work as an old-school creature feature and if you’re a fan of Richard Laymon’s The Cellar or Jack Ketchum’s Off Season,Misfits might be the familiar, late-night value meal you crave.
