Live Wire by Kyle Toucher

Crystal Lake Publishing, 2023

ISBN-13: 9781957133324

Available: Paperback, ebook

Buy:  Bookshop.org | Amazon.com 

While Live Wire is the book title, it’s also an apt description of the writing: it crackles and snaps with electricity.  For a horror/thriller, this is a good one to start the summer with.  It’s also one of the nuttier ideas to come down the pike.  Transmission line towers that uproot themselves from the desert and start stomping around, wreaking havoc?  That’s one plot that certainly hasn’t been done before!

The book runs two threads concurrently.  In the first, former wannabe rock star Pale Brody, his young son, and a long-distance trucker named Ken Lightfeather are hunkered down at a ‘”last chance” desert gas station, riding out the worst electrical storm ever seen.  Also with them is the aging station owner, Otis Thompson.  The towers pull loose at the height of the storm, and the four of them are faced with a situation that is certainly not covered in the US Army’s Field Survival Manual.

The other thread covers the shadowy science and engineering firm whose experiments enabled the electrical pylons to go walkabout.  Nikki and Randy are two scientists who leave the firm in the middle of an experiment gone wrong, when it unleashes bloody carnage on the whole group.  The scientists eventually cross paths with the store group, and they band together to survive the towers from hell.  And hell (or something like it) just may be where the towers get their powers from, for they have abilities beyond just walking around and destroying things.  

Live Wire is an extremely engrossing book that will have readers zipping through pages, mainly due to the author’s excellent writing and sense of pace.  It’s that classic “tight but loose” style of writing: it drives the narrative and gets the story across, but doesn’t take itself too seriously.  There are a lot of hilarious asides and analogies, both from the characters and the narrator, giving the story an easy, flowing feeling that makes the pages move quickly.  The humor really shows up in the interrogation transcripts that are spaced throughout the book, as Nikki proves hilarious with her sarcastic way of belittling the investigators questioning her.  This book, at heart, is unquestionably a thrill ride, but the humor and wit of the characters help give the story a big boost.   Some readers might be a little bothered by the lack of fully detailed explanation for why things happen, but there’s enough there to keep most readers happy.  Some is left to the imagination, and the story is better off for it.

Bottom line: for a thriller with a bit of a horror bent to it, this one covers all the bases.  Recommended.

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson