by J.N. Williamson
1991 Zebra Books
This started life as a novella length Steven King parody before it was padded out to 400 pages. I don't know if the parody part was written out, unless the joke is that it's padded out to 400 pages.
Alcoholic, failed writer Rich Stenvall gets arrested for DWI. The Sheriff has left town for a conference and left the jail in control of a psychiatrist, who recruits the writer to help with his experiments involving plants.
The plant causes a fungus to take over its victim's bodies and emerge from every pore and orifice in a relatively calm and ungory manner. There's no "destructive orgy of bloody violence" or "savage jailhouse violence", just some blooming mushrooms.
The novel is in first person and jumps point of view to a few other characters in the first few chapters, but this doesn't get developed and goes nowhere. There are also hints that Stenvall's alcoholism is wait makes him immune to the fungus, but this gets forgotten too - it's not as if he'd be the only alchy in jail, on either side of the bars.
The novel has a dreamlike quality, but I think that's less a stylistic choice and more the result of being so removed from reality. Jails are not isolated places. Shifts change, cops show up to book new prisoners, families come to visit. You can't really have the entire jail, staff and all, die without someone noticing.
The novel ends with everyone dying except Stenvall, who walks out of an unlocked, unmanned jail. He comes back a few days later to find the jail still unlocked, unmanned, and completely empty scrubbed clean. Except for one room filled with fungus, dun dun dunnnn! So a government conspiracy covered it all up but left one room for dramatic purposes.
Williamson's anthologies, such as the Masques series, tend to be better received than his fiction, which at least here failed to deliver on the promises on the back cover.
Paperback available from Amazon
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