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    The Missing
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    The Missing
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    The Missing
    Ebook413 pages7 hours

    The Missing

    By Sarah Langan

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A remote and affluent Maine community, Corpus Christi was untouched by the environmental catastrophe that destroyed the neighboring blue-collar town of Bedford. But all that will change in a heartbeat . . .

    The nightmare is awakened when third-grade schoolteacher Lois Larkin takes the children on a field trip to Bedford. There in the abandoned woods, a small, cruel boy unearths an ancient horror—a contagious plague that transforms its victims into something violent, hungry . . . and inhuman.

    The long, dark night is just beginning. And all hope must die as the contagion feeds—for the malevolence will not rest until it has devoured every living soul in Corpus Christi . . . and beyond.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061847400
    Unavailable
    The Missing
    Author

    Sarah Langan

    Sarah Langan, a Columbia MFA graduate and three-time recipient of the Bram Stoker Award, is the author of several novels including A Better World and Good Neighbors. She grew up on Long Island and she currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughters. Find out more at SarahLangan.com.

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    Reviews for The Missing

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      Virus is frightening, creepy, and definitely not to be read at night. The characters and plot are very believable, as are the actions of many of the residents of Corpus Christi. The story itself is easy to read but difficult to put down. With a style reminiscent of early Stephen King, Virus delivers genuine tension and thrills as well as a desire to continue reading. This book is a scary read and highly recommended. Langlan is an author to watch in future. I genuinely believe we will see good things from her.
    • 3/5
      This is a mix between zombie novel and a vampire novel. The infected don't die; instead the virus changes them, altering their physiology to meet its needs. They feed, eating every part of flesh from the bodies (zombie). They also have mind reading abilities and light sensitivity that forces them to sleep during the day (vampire). The mix works fairly well. The story is told from the point of view of multiple characters, those who live in the small town that will become ground zero for the plague. I was fairly impressed at Langan's ability to give each character depth and complexity in each small chapter, though a couple of them who fell into the cookie cutter range. It was a strange thing that as the story progressed, I slowly began to like the characters less and less instead of the other way around. I eventually didn't care much what happened to them.Despite not loving the characters, this was a fast paced novel, an easy, lightweight read, and just what I needed at the moment.I didn't realize that this was the second book in a series when I picked it up. The story just kind of ends and it feels very much like it's still in the middle of things. I enjoyed this enough that I'm curious to go read about the events that are hinted at in the first book. And I'd be interested in following, what happens next, as well.
    • 4/5
      While there are elements of "bits of Stephen King" in the story - small town in Maine, characters with a rough past - I think this book should be more well liked by fans of Guillermo del Toro's The Strain trilogy. The characters are very real, some pitiful, some two-faced, some degenerate, some you end up cheering for when you least expect it. But most of all, I enjoy that there isn't a happy ending. That's horror for you. Someone doesn't always save the world. There's a supernatural element that isn't fully explained, but has it's origins in the ghost town of Bedford. This is where it also feels like Silent Hill. Bedford was abandoned because of a fire and the sulfuric content in the air. But that dark, brooding hate of Bedford resurrects something that possess anything that it comes into contact with. A plague that is mistaken for a virus, attacks the town of Corpus Christi. It spreads quickly and transforms people into something inhuman, grotesque and rotting. The plague is mistakenly identified as a virus, both airborne and transferred by the exchange of bodily fluid but just like in the Strain, it isn't. Although certain points don't get explained, I can accept that because it kept me enthralled. I couldn't put it down and read it in two days, and there were parts that genuinely gave me the chills. But then again, perhaps I should have read "The Keeper" first, and it apparently explains a lot of what happened to the town of Bedford without "The Missing" being a direct sequel.
    • 2/5
      Pretty darn good for 250 pages, but then it unfortunately limps to the finish line. Not a bad Halloween book, but I liked her first one better.
    • 4/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed this book as much as I enjoyed The Keeper. Now with this book, we were in the town over from Bedford where the last one took place. She so reminds me of Stephen King. This book had everything from exotic descriptions to the horror that I have come to love so much.Things happen so slowly, yet so fast. First of all with the class trip to Bedford, a young boy named James takes it upon himself to get lost and then the voices talk to him. They know what he wants, what he is like. Then he is attacked and killed by animals. The dirt in Bedford is squishy like it's made up of blood. It even smells like it. With Ms. Langan's descriptions, you can practically see everything and everyone in this book. Everyone in the town seems to know that something is coming, but they aren't sure when or where, but they know that it's coming. It's a tale of survival and not letting the madness take over your mind. Even the reader knows something is coming, but not sure when and where it's going to happen.The infection seems to move quickly. People end up getting sick and guess what ... these people are dead and turned into zombies, more or less. Oh, and we all know how I love these kinds of books. The tone of the book is dark, which is why it had it's appeal for me. It's an edge of your seat tale of nail-biting terror.
    • 2/5
      Virus is a short story masquerading as a novel where the plot centres around a virus, of psychological power, or potentially of the realm of the supernatural. Each chapter is a struggle to complete as the myriad of characters meander off-plot almost incessantly, with their histories told usually paragraphs before they expire, which somewhat removes any page-turning qualities. There are striking similarities to her previous book, The Keeper, which unfortunately carried the same issues (and some similar parts of the plot too). Overall, Virus has no likeable characters, at times is hard to follow and ultimately offers little reward for actually getting through it.
    • 2/5
      In The Missing, an industrial accident unleashes a virus that creates zombie-like flesh eaters, feasting on an affluent town in Maine.I picked this up as my annual Halloween read, but it didn't do much for me. The story and characters were interesting enough, in a soap-opera kind of way, but there was way too much grade-school gore, and not nearly enough terror. I like my horror novels to be truly frightening, to follow me around for days (I'm thinking of The Haunting of Hill House, or early Stephen King). This one was just not scary.
    • 3/5
      Sarah Langan sure does like Stephen King. Perhaps she doesn't realize how much he's rolling around in her head, but it seems like she went looking for her voice and found his instead. Her stories read like the kind of dream you would have if you took a King novel to bed and woke up the next morning, with a plot of your own rolling around that you struggle to make sense of. I picked this one up because my library said it was a zombie book, and I had a zombie research project of sorts in the works. It's not really a zombie book. Well, it is in that there is a contagion in the town that appears to turn those affected into flesh-eaters - but it's very unclear how this happens, and generalized evil dreck from the site of a former supernatural tragedy has a large part to play in this. I would argue that Langan is working out her Stephen King issues in a big way here, and that what the people in this town really have is whatever was in the bottom of the mine in King's Desperation. Same symptoms. The changed are crazy and antisocial, but not mindless, and they have the same weird gore/respiratory symptoms as did those touched by Tak. Maybe a little of The Tommyknockers thrown in, and a definite nod to Straub's Eyes of the Dragon - the prologue narrator's husband is like a character straight out of that book.The biggest problem with Langan is that all of her characters seemed to be crazy going in, so it's hard to tell who's been affected, and whether they would have been any better off if they managed to escape. Another of her books, Audrey's Door, which is Langan's version of The Shining/Haunting of Hill House, demonstrated this phenomenon the best. The main character meets a doorman - over the course of a very superficial conversation decides he wants her body, no, wait, he thinks of her as his daughter. She insults his parenting and implies that the daughter he briefly mentions is crazy, then decides he's fatherly and she likes him. What??? In the beginning of Langan's The Keeper, there is a sentence that says, effectively, that the whole town, while obsessing about the crazy main character, had decided their other problems were worse and, AS A GROUP, without speaking to one another about it, decided to stop thinking about/discussing her. Does this seem likely to you? Reading Langan is like watching the Brontes write King. And yet, I think I'm giving the impression here that this book, and Langan's other works, are awful. Literary merit aside, they ARE compelling. It's that dream quality they have, I think. I'd give them a chance. It's like a tale told late at night, by the fireside. Sometimes everything doesn't always have to make sense.
    • 5/5
      The town of Corpus Christi, Maine, is a nice middle-class suburb where life is quiet, until a class field trip disturbs something better left sleeping. Very quickly, a sickness spreads through town - but this is no ordinary virus. It preys on a person's deepest fears and failures, and turns its victims into something very different from human. Sarah Langan has crafted a great story that starts with a set of flawed characters, then ratchets up the horror until the story becomes apocaplyptic. This is one creepy story. It's a sequel to The Keeper, her previous novel, but the stories are only loosely connected. If you want the full effect, read 'em in order, but The Missing certainly stands on its own.
    • 2/5
      I'm not entirely sure what to make of this book...
      As the POV switched so often, I didn't feel any sort of attachment to any of the characters, so the deaths really didn't mean much to me. I thought it was interesting how the reader never really quite got to see exactly what the infected did, from a POV chapter. Everything was hinted at, through the remains of the people and animals - and although it was obvious what went on, without a full description of it, it felt like the reader was partially in the dark, like the infected when they attacked.
      As I mentioned previously, none of the characters really drew me in. There were quite a lot of stereotypes - Maddie especially annoyed me; I just really hate the overuse of teen slang in books. Lois was a complete sap. I still don't understand why the virus centred around her, why she was in control, and why Fenstad's family lasted the longest.
      Quite a grim read, although I'm not sure what I was really expecting from the blurb!

      Also posted on my blog, Rinn Reads.