As World War II rages, Meiko shares eerie childhood stories, of yokai and malevolent demons, with her daughter, Aiko. These stories hold them together as they must confront the horror of being shipped to an internment camp in the Midwest. Never mind that Aiko is American, that her father is in the US Navy. They are Japanese.
As Meiko and Aiko learn to live in captivity, a contagion begins to spread in the camp. What starts as a cold quickly becomes fits of violence and aggression, even death, and soon a government medical team arrive, more sinister than the illness itself.
Meanwhile strange things are happening outside the camp. Wrecked weather balloons and tragic explosions draw Fran, a German expat journalist, and Archie, a widowed minister, into a world of conspiracy and creatures in the shadows.
As the world tears itself apart, it falls to Meiko, Fran, and Archie to lay their country's demons to rest.
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'WELL, GOSH, DARNIT, WOULDN'T YOU JUST'.1
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(@TitanBooks, 4 October 2022, e-book, 368 pages, ARC from the publisher via @ NetGalley)
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I really enjoyed The Fervor. The books reminds me to the TV series, The Terror: Infamy in that the show is also set at the Japanese camps and also features demons and Japanese myths and a strange illness. The two are very similar and my knowledge of the period and the TV show helped me enjoy the book a lot more. This is the kind of horror I enjoy the most, subtle, unsettling and skin-crawling. I thought this was a terrific read.
