Sarah Langan's The Missing (Harper, 416pp ISBN 978-0060872915) is a horror novel published in 2007, with an alternative title --Virus (Headline, 436pp ISBN 978-07553-33745).
The Missing
Teacher Lois Larkin is having a bad day; her speech impediment is worse than ever, her fiancée has dumped her, and she’s just learned from the local paper that he’s married her supposed best friend. Worse, she’s pregnant by him. Leaving her lunch at home is only the topping on a nightmare dessert of a day. Small wonder that when she takes the children in her class on an outing to the next town, Bedford, she forgets the class dunce.
It’s this level of detail, and Langan’s ability to evoke the reader’s compassion for protagonists who turn into monsters that helps to make The Missing (or Virus as it is called in the UK) more than a standard horror novel.
The clichéd definition of horror is ‘when bad things happen to good people,’ and Langan carefully evokes our sympathy for each of the main characters; Lois Larkin, the teacher who becomes the virus’ intellect; the Wintrobs, Fenstad the psychiatrist who provides the intellectual analysis of the virus, Meg the Librarian who is its heart, their daughter Maddie and her boyfriend Enrique; Danny Walker, spoilt rich kid who develops a conscience, and Lila Schiffer, abandoned trophy wife; even the monstrous Albert Sanguine who Langan so memorably describes as ‘straddling the mouth of hell.’
Sarah Langan
The Missing is Sarah Langan’s second novel, and the sequel to her debut The Keeper. She has written a dozen or so short stories, including an appearance in Horror: The Best of the Year. She is one of a small group of horror and thriller writers that includes Lee Thomas, Stefan Patrucha and Nicholas Kaufman.
Apocalyptic Horror
Little James Walker is left alone to wander in the woods which are strangely silent, and he is soon infected by the eponymous virus, turning him into something so close to a flesh-craving zombie as to be indistinguishable from the classic horror trope. The Missing stands squarely in the tradition of apocalyptic horror such as Stephen King’s The Stand.
What distinguishes The Missing from most such novels is the detailed epidemiology that Langan works into the novel, providing a scientific rationale for many of the symptoms ascribed to demonic entities. Nonetheless, the level of gore that seeps through The Missing places it closer to Night of the Living Dead than to the crystalline science of The Andromeda Strain. There is the faintest glimmer of light at the end, but whether it’s salvation or the metaphorical approaching train is unclear; given Sarah Langan’s willingness to put her characters (and her readers) through the emotional wringer, it would be unwise to bet either way.
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