Tales from the Bargain Bin: "The Town That Forgot How to Breathe" should really take up breathing exercises

So since, I had a lot of fun with the last Tales From the Bargain Bin I decided to do one more. As I said last time, this review series is about reviewing books that I've 1) read at least one year ago that 2) also aren't very good 3)(almost) entirely from memory. But this time, I'm going back further then one year. I'm going back almost seven years.

Since in my last article, I picked on a book whose politics I profoundly disagreed with, this time I'm going to pick on a book whose politics are closer to my own. At least to the extent that the books politics are, you know, "Gee, guys. Pollution and disrespect for nature really are bad aren't they."

This bring me to "The Town that Forgot How to Breathe", a book which, at the least, has it's heart in the right place. You could feel that the writer cared passionately about the environment.  It's just a shame that he had to stop what could have been a really interesting story to be preachy.

The premise would not be out of place in a horror movie and indeed the first part of the book plays about much like a Stephen King novel.  The main character is a recently divorced father who brings his young daughter to that oldest of horror tropes: a small town with a secret. In this case, the town is a settlement in Canada with a history of fairy sightings and more recently, the dissapearance of a local father and his daughter.

Our protagonist, Generic Protagonist, soon befriends the mother of the missing girl who is dealing with problems of our own. Mainly, she is seeing apparitions of her husband and their daughter. Is this haunting connected to the mysterious plague causing the town's residents  to asphyxiate?

The answer is maybe? Kind of? The book is pretty vague on that point. There's nothing wrong with ambiguity in favor of a good story.  Unfortunately,  this is not a good story: it's a weird technophobic screed about the evils of technology.  SPOILERS from this point on:

The answer to all the supernatural goings on turn out to be that human activity has screwed up the connection between the town and the world of the faeries. This has created the supernatural equivalent of intestinal blockage, and the strange  happenings are a magic enema, creating a torrent of magical diarrhea so that everything can be set right. (That metaphor may have gotten away from me).

By the way, the human activity that causes all this chaos: Putting up power lines. Not pollution. Not overuse of natural resources (indeed, the townspeople's overfishing is treated sympathetically). No: it's just the use of electricity. Because technology is the devil and the we should all go back to before the time of indoor plumbing and live in the trees.

Look, I try to be environmentally conscious but it's not an either or situation. There are going to need to be some tough decisions made about the overuse of technology in the future but it doesn't mean that we should give up all the technological advances of the last several centuries.

Also, the book treatment of the ghosts is really messed up. It's implied that the father murdered the daughter and killed himself. But that's ok because they're happy being ghosts. That's a really uncomfortable minimization on child abuse by any standard.

Looking at the book's Amazon page , they changed the cover in an attempt to mark it as more of a horror novel. But this book is at best a mediocre literary novel with some horror elements.  The sad thing is that there are some effective scare scenes.  If this book had just stuck to ripping of Stephen King, it might actually have been good.