Horror Novel Black Creek by Gregory Lamberson Arriving in March 2016
Debi Moore
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Black Creek, the twelfth novel from award-winning Buffalo author (The Julian Year) and filmmaker Gregory Lamberson (Killer Rack), will be published by Medallion Press on March 15, 2016. The contemporary eco-horror novel, which pits residents of Black Creek Village and neighboring Cayuga Island against cannibal mutants during a snowstorm, revisits the Love Canal environmental disaster from the 1970s.
For those who are unfamiliar with what happened, then-President Jimmy Carter authorized the relocation of 800 families from the Niagara Falls, New York, community when decades worth of toxic dumping were deemed responsible for sickness and birth defects in the area.
“I grew up an hour south of Love Canal, and as a child I was aware of the disaster from TV news reports,” says Lamberson. “Children were born with birth defects including club feet and two rows of teeth on each jaw. People of all ages suffered from cancer. Toxic ooze backed up into basements. A decade later, on a trip home from New York City, I wound up in a taxi driven by a man who had moved his family into a rehabilitated Love Canal house because it was all they could afford. When I moved to Buffalo in 2003, I visited the area, which is less than a half hour’s drive from my house. It was eerie: The main site where toxic chemicals had been dumped for decades is fenced in, just an empty compound covered with grass and a couple of buildings, surrounded by trees and closed-off streets with cracked asphalt, with a few isolated houses remaining just beyond the fence. Right across the street is a working class neighborhood, and there’s a million-dollar playground on the other side of the zone. Someone decided ‘Black Creek Village’ was a more appealing name, but to me it was the perfect title for a horror novel. I was also fascinated that Cayuga Island, known to locals as ‘Teachers’ Island,’ is five minutes away and consists of beautiful, expensive homes.”
Black Creek presents a community under siege by a snowstorm and humanoid mutants living beneath the containment zone. The storm was inspired by the blizzard of ’77, a snowstorm which buried Western New York.
“I did a lot of research on Love Canal, but I experienced the blizzard of ’77 firsthand,” says the author. “I wanted to take these two events from my childhood and deal with them in a fictional horror setting. The history of Love Canal is found within the novel – the corporate assault on the environment, the denials by the local government, and the efforts of advocates to expose what had been done to this community – but at the end of the day, this is a straight-on horror novel, a violent, gory survival yarn. My goal was to entertain, but in this case I also wanted to educate. When I speak to people who have no idea what happened in Love Canal, I know all that research I did was worthwhile.”
Synopsis:
In 1979, the US government relocated more than eight hundred families from Love Canal, New York, after decades of toxic contamination. Not all of the residents left: Some remained in their homes on the outskirts of the disaster area. Others went underground. Hiding. Changing. Breeding.
Almost four decades later, Love Canal has been renamed Black Creek Village and restored for inhabitation. The residents there and on neighboring Cayuga Island remember the tragedy of Love Canal but have no knowledge of the monsters living below the surface. When the worst snowstorm in forty years isolates all of western New York, the forgotten inhabitants of Love Canal emerge from hiding to reclaim what once belonged to them.
And they are hungry…
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