The Breeze Horror

Candace Caponegro

Caponegro's sole novel has, over the past decade and a half or so, simultaneously languished in obscurity and gained a massive cult following in the horror underground. Reading it after finally acquiring a copy, I can see why the latter happened; I can only put the former down to someone's idiocy at the publishing house. The Breeze Horror should have been a blockbuster.

Sandy and her two-year-old boy are headed to the babysitter's one morning when it begins to rain. Nothing odd about that, right? Except this isn't normal rain; it's causing New York City to call for an evacuation. Sandy flees to her parents' summer home on Breeze Island to wait out the storm. After it passes, those who got sick from the rain are quarantined on the beach, but they're not getting sicker... they're getting better. And they're not happy.

Combine one part Animal Farm, one part Civil War historical novel, and one part Lucio Fulci film (The Breeze Horror has often been cited as the progenitor of the splatterpunk novel), and you have an idea of The Breeze Horror. Reading it fifteen years after its original release, a lot of it's going to seem oddly familiar to you. That's because you've seen it all in other places since. The Breeze Horror's influence can be felt in a thousand places, both in underground and mainstream horror books and films (both 28 Days Later... and the recent Dawn of the Dead remake lift scenes from the book almost verbatim, for example), but unlike some influential novels, that doesn't decrease The Breeze Horror's power in the least. It doesn't just come from being proto-splatterpunk (and despite the lengths to which Jacob, Lee, Devereaux, etc. have gone in the intervening time, The Breeze Horror still rates uncomfortably high on the squick factor), but from Caponegro's deft touch with the "some are more equal than others" power dynamic (thus the Animal Farm reference above). The plot is far more layered than that of your average horror novel, and it shows in how well the books still holds up this long after its release.

Well worth tracking down, and a book that cries out for another printing. Preferably a very large one, so that a legion of extreme horror fans can see part of its genesis as a viable art form.