A Pig, Corporate Eviction, and Cosmic Doom? “The Aggregate” Goes There

Let’s take inventory.

A criminal collective. A corporation enforcing genetic patents. Three bodies after an eviction goes horribly wrong. A pig named Wilbur speaking for something buried beneath the earth.

Okay, “The Aggregate.” You have my attention.

G. Owen Wears, author of “The Place of Stars & Bones,” drops Lucy Ashwood into a brutal late-September Colorado landscape filled with dust, cicadas, dead fields, and a sky burned nearly white. She finishes another unremarkable day and wakes to find two MontVida Corporation men and a sheriff’s deputy dead at her family home.

They came to serve notice of genetic patent violations and evict the Ashwoods. The family fought back. Now there has been an accidental bloodbath, and the only people willing to help belong to a criminal collective called the Aggregate.

Naturally, their help is not free.

That alone gives the book a nasty noir setup. Then Lucy goes on the run, the guilt starts chewing through her, and the waking nightmares kick in. She begins to suspect that what happened at home involved something beyond murder.

Here comes the fun stuff.

A malevolent presence has risen from the soil. It speaks through Wilbur, Lucy’s pig, slips into the drone of the cicadas, and rides the hot wind. It wants a foothold in Lucy’s world, and once it gets one, it plans to force its way through the veil between worlds.

Yes, the pig talks for the cosmic entity. No, I will not be strolling casually past any farm animals after dark.

For horror readers who like their genres smashed together, the premise sits on an interesting stretch of shelf space. “The Gone World” also places crime beside an enormous existential threat, although Tom Sweterlitsch’s novel uses a murder investigation, possible futures, and an approaching end-of-humanity event.

John Langan’s “The Fisherman” is another fair reference point for readers drawn to grief, dangerous bargains, and an old terror rooted in a specific landscape. Its story follows two widowers pulled toward dark pacts and buried secrets surrounding Dutchman’s Creek. “The Aggregate” trades water for scorched soil, but both premises understand that the land can hold something much bigger and meaner than the humans walking across it.

There is also a faint “Mexican Gothic” connection in the way dreams and a hostile environment begin closing around the protagonist. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novel follows Noemí Taboada into an isolated house that invades her dreams with visions of blood and doom. The plots are very different, but readers who enjoy a setting becoming part of the threat may recognize the appeal.

Wears has thrown corporate dystopia, criminal noir, family disaster, waking nightmares, and cosmic horror into the same dusty field. Better yet, the bizarre details are attached to a very human problem: Lucy is terrified, guilty, and trying to survive what happened to her family.

One five-star reader called the novel “wonderfully weird,” praised its multifaceted characters and hot Colorado setting, and reported that the story became even better during a second reading. The reviewer also described it as cinematic enough to translate well into a movie or series.

Honestly, the image sells itself: a bleached sky, cicadas screaming from the trees, three corpses on the ground, and Wilbur opening his mouth while something ancient speaks through him.

That’ll do, pig. That’ll absolutely do.