Whisper House Press

Book: Tick Town

Author: Christopher A. Micklos

Publisher: Castle Bridge Media

Estimated Publication Date: June 2025

Capone’s Rating: 5 of 5 ⭐s

My first foray into pulp horror did not disappoint! Christopher Micklos executes with precision, perfectly setting up and knocking down the tropey pins—but with a unique twist reflecting Micklos’s own authorial voice and vision.

The delightfully named Tomahawk Hollow is a portrait of Middle America. Farmsteads, a main street, a town sheriff who’s mostly on his own, and a mayor who’s up to his elbows in private commitments and sidebars looking suspiciously like bad dealings. There’s the local family farmers, whose cows being picked off—was that one farm or three where such is said to have happened? And that old pesticide factory… What’s up with that old place? There are teens out in the woods, against fatherly advice. Now they’re arguing. Now one storms off.

This is the setup for a book I wish I’d written, Tick Town. In it, a mostly third-person omniscient narrator (or is it third-close, but shifting?) carries us from victim to victim, perp to perp, do-gooder to would-be do-gooder. Nameless out-of-towners, beware! In this book, characters are set up to be taken down, to be taken seriously, to be laughed out, or to be dismissed as part of the bloody scenery. Somehow, amid all this, Micklos manages to treat all his characters with respect; they seem like real people and aren’t merely pop-up villains (even those mysterious guys with guns). It’s a romp of a novel that reads fast, whose author transitions deftly between POVs (a late chapter has what must be one of the best close-third POV shifts internal to a chapter I’ve come across; maybe you’ll spot it when you get there). Micklos’s prose flows with ease, his pacing and chapter structures perpetuating the reader onward and forward—but, importantly, without resorting to cheap tricks. The cliffhangers aren’t so cliffhangery that I feel I’ve been swindled; instead, I’ve been led on. All in all, Micklos provides crisp examples of carefully and gleefully rendered gore and humor, and whether or not you’ve read pulpy horror before, you should check this out.

One last comment, here: Take a good look at the cover image below for one of the best-designed, best-suited covers of any I’ve seen in my long years of reading. It’s a thing of beauty.

Perfectly executed.

If I get to teach my horror literature course next year, this book is going on the reading list.