Book Review:
THE BRIDGE by John Skipp and Craig Spector
by Paul V. Wargelin

T.S. Eliot once said that the world wouldn’t end with a bang but a whimper. John Skipp and Craig Spector deliver the whimper of a newborn Earth in The Bridge, speculating an apocalypse not caused by warring nations, meteor strikes, or Biblical judgments, but by humanity’s own careless greed.

In the backwoods of Paradise, Pennsylvania, barrel after barrel of industrial by-products have found a home in Codorus Creek beneath Black Bridge, dumped there by the town’s waste disposal company. Unable to keep on top of the sheer amount of garbage produced by local corporate businesses, this out-of-sight, out-of-mind policy has served the community for more than fifteen years.

But on Sunday, November 23, the toxic stew that’s been brewing there has achieved sentience as a fusion of chemical refuse and the natural world calling itself Overmind. Poisoning and consuming everything it touches, Overmind adds humans to its mix (starting with the big dumb bastards whose last delivery to the bridge provided the spark of life), recreating them in its own contaminated image as little more than living corpses driven by the entity’s desire to spread its contagion.

Caught up in this unnatural disaster, the ensemble cast of quirky and fallible (i.e. realistic) characters must face their own demons as well as the mutations they encounter—from the wealthy industrialists attempting to cover up their lethal snafu and the opportunistic journalist desperate to break the story to the HazMat squad leader willing to walk where even angels would fear to tread and the punk teen publishers whose “No Future” ’zine is more prophetic than they could have possibly imagined.

But it is the future of expectant parents Gwen and Gary Taylor that earns the reader’s sympathy and allegiance. Separated when Gary is called into work at the local television station covering the catastrophe, Gwen spends the day with her friend Micki Bridges—and Micki’s spirit guide Bob-Ramtha (making Micki probably the quirkiest character ever encountered in a Skipp & Spector novel). When Overmind’s infection threatens Gwen and her unborn child, it falls to Micki to protect her using wiccan magick as an Earth Mother Warrior, the last line of defense in the face of nature gone mad.

The Bridge is an epic adrenaline ride, a culmination of everything Messers Skipp and Spector did in their previous novels and more. Although the horror is presented in supernatural guise, the true horror is humanity’s willful and wanton destruction of Earth’s environment—and thereby ourselves—all for commerce and convenience. The authors have never shied away from controversy and have always been willing to take the heat for the stories they’ve written—and the visceral, no-holds-barred prose style they employed in writing them (earning the moniker “Splatterpunks” for their efforts). The Bridge is a middle finger salute to mass consumerism.

The novel’s message isn’t delivered from a preacher’s pulpit or as a “Save the World” campaign, but as a full frontal assault declaring that Earth will evolve to survive in its new atmosphere no matter how polluted it becomes. What doesn’t kill Earth only makes it stronger—strong enough to give birth to a new lifeform and dispose of the pestilence that is humanity.

The authors’ concern is genuine, as the book includes an informative appendix full of suggestions for recycling, energy conservation, healthy lifestyle changes, land and water preservation, political involvement, and more. But make no mistake, The Bridge is first and foremost a horror novel, ending where most apocalyptic stories begin. In Stephen King’s masterpiece The Stand, the survivors of “Captain Trips” gather together after the virus has decimated humanity, suggesting hope. Messers Skipp and Spector offer no such reprieve. Overmind engulfs Paradise in less than a day, sparing no living creature in its path.

In this Inconvenient Truth era, The Bridge is more relevant now than when it was originally published and deserves to be back in print (with an updated appendix) for a twenty-first century readership—in a twenty-first century environment.


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