'Neath the pumpkin patch

Hello!

Back to the horror briefly today for a review of Drone by Dan Howarth, which really nailed isolated, rural horror, but ultimately didn’t completely stick the landing for me.

ONCE YOU HEAR IT… Gallagher’s life on the island should be idyllic. Yet his scenic, remote farm turns a meagre profit and provides little distraction from his vices.

When a strange noise infects the island’s inhabitants, Gallagher’s rural life is infiltrated by tension and unease. His neighbours become unpredictable and dangerous, threatening the fabric of island life beyond anything Gallagher has ever known.

As the community descends into fear and violence, Gallagher finds a way to silence the sound, but is this slice of peace worth the terrible cost?

But the hum didn’t allow him to think or to plan or to exist in the way he needed to. It’s why he found himself here. Armed. Ready.

I wanted to know more about the hum.

That was my lasting thought after finishing Drone, and I think it kept me from fully appreciating the atmosphere and rural horror to its full extent. It’s difficult because I know from online accounts of the hum, and where it has cropped up in other media that it’s not necessarily got a black and white answer, or a resolution, but it felt like aside from Gallagher following the hum and trying to alleviate it, and the doctor offering to reach out to connections on the mainline, there wasn’t a concerted effort to get to the bottom of the issue. Even as the costs were becoming more evident, with fewer people around, places boarded up, and the impact it had on the livestock; and in a community that was clearly so focused on farming, that last one made it a bit harder to understand the lack of drive to really look for an answer.

However, what Howarth absolutely captures is the bleak, isolation of a truly rural community, in the grips of not only the horror hidden within the hum, but the facing the harsh, reality of economic change, the limitations and strengths of island life. It felt like a landscape bleached of colour and life, with just the last few stubborn stalwarts carving out their existence. Especially when there was a simmering undercurrent of old grudges, dislike and competition between those same people. So, in some ways it is easy to understand why there was no consensus on trying to solve the mystery of the hum.

Gallagher wasn’t a particularly likeable character, but Howarth does do a fantastic job of showing how he has become this isolated man, fighting against the economy, the lows of farming, and the hum. You have to appreciate his stubbornness in the face of so many challenges, and I did feel for him when his very livelihood became a victim of the hum. He sits in that cusp of being a man with little both everything to lose, and nothing to lose, and yet with everything to try and fight for.

The last part of the novella is a brutal look at what happens when everyone is ultimately out for themselves, and where control, and reason, has slipped away, drowned out by the hum. There were twists that I absolutely didn’t expect, and it very much felt there was no escaping the inevitable at this point. What I didn’t love about the ending was the POV change which was a little jarring after Gallagher had been so present and dominant. It also felt a little more like a pause, than an ending, because there was an eye to an uncertain future – because we don’t fully know what has happened elsewhere on the island, and again I felt that lack of answers.

In terms of atmosphere, and that creeping, hollowness of remote, rural horror Drone absolutely nails it; and Gallagher in his own way is a quietly compelling character. The harshness and struggle of his livelihood, a mundane but compelling horror against the more visceral horror of the drone and its fallout. Howarth also manages to weave that sound into existence through his writing, making it uncomfortably easy to imagine especially as the story rose towards a crescendo. Drone was a compelling read, even if it didn’t fully satisfy me.