Book Review: With a Blighted Touch

Title: With a Blighted Touch

Author: J. Todd Kingrea

Date: October 2023

Publisher: BHC Press

ISBN: 978-1-64397-363-0 

Quote: "I've been to doctors ever since the...blackouts started...They can't find any cause for them."

But when Kit's blackouts occur, at the same time, someone who has touched him dies. Kit's still a young man, a failed musician, an addict, and two of every five people in his high school class are dead. Kit grew up in the fictional town of Black Rock, below Blackpoint Mountain, where kids love to repeat the legends about the charred black stones and the sour-smelling whitish fungus that grows in the area, "the blight," being part of some primordial curse associated with a spirit of death trapped in the scorched rocks. 

Kit's always half joked about being cursed. When he lets his memories reopen, he remembers that the evil spirit of Blackpoint Mountain chose him, when he was a child. Black Rock is one of those little towns where all the families are old, all the old families have some sort of sick secret, and then there's that family who are really nasty. Kit had been getting the worst of a fight with some of them after school when the spirit told him that he'll never know when, or which one, but for all his life, he'll be subject to blackouts during which someone who's touched him will die.

Before he remembered this Kit touched a nice, friendly old school friend, the divorced mother of two daughters. So he has to confront his old enemies, find the ancient book, and face the embodiment of death in the cave, to protect these friends.

All the archetypes best loved by horror fiction fans come out and dance in the Great Smoky Mountains, in the summer of 2011. Including the innocent person who naively sets the stage for some sort of return, or recurrence, in the 2020s.

I read it with a chortle, as I read the main plot of Anne McCaffrey's Pern books, at the effects continually scrubbing mold off things can have on the imagination...but if you want something to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, this horrid tale, with its funguslike zombie children and its school bullies who grow up to worship demons, is for you. 

There are things like that. They are found wherever humans are found; they are humans' archetypes. The forms they take in your city neighborhood are familiar. What forms might they take in the scenic hills where you vacation? J. Todd Kingrea knows. Stephen King (who's not noticeably related to me) ought to appreciate his mix of terror, horror, and gross-out.