Book Review: Anomaly Flats

Anomaly Flats. Clayton Smith. Dapper Press, October 22, 2015, Trade Paperback and Kindle, 268 pages.

Reviewed by Andrew Reynolds.

I admit that, prior to this review, I had never read any of Clayton Smith's works. After reading his most recent novel, I find myself wondering if I have made a major error.

Were you a fan of Weird Tales or are you someone who has all the episodes of One Step Beyond in your DVD/TiVo collection? Remember how there was always some strange event, object, or location that served as the central focus of the story? Well, pile all those strange, odd, dangerous, and destructive things in one place and you get an idea of what the day-to-day reality of “Anomaly Flats” is like.

Anomaly Flats is the fictional town in Missouri where Clayton Smith's hero, Mallory, lands as she attempts to escape her past and make a new beginning. But this town is not a place for new beings. Mallory is stranded when her car breaks down shortly after arriving in town. She soon finds that in Anomaly Flats, the bizarre is the stuff of everyday life. She encounters natives who range from hostile to the outright strange. She meets and befriends Lewis, a scientist who came to town years before to study it's strangeness after receiving an invitation he had somehow written to himself. He, in turn, shows her just how strange the town truly is. Metallic rain, streams filled with plasma that induces spontaneous mutations, a patch of Mars somehow transported to the surface of the Earth . . . all that and more make Anomaly Flats a place where one wrong move can lead to death or worse. If all that weren’t enough, a prank Mallory plays on Lewis results in them coming into conflict with an ancient evil that resides in the local Walmart.

Overall, Anomaly Flats is a satisfying read, the sort of book you don't mind sitting down with while letting your mind wander. It has a few problems, including a plot that can go from full-speed-ahead to idle within a page and an opening scene involving a bridge collapse that could have benefited from a quick consultation of a basic civil engineering text, but they aren't enough to detract from your reading enjoyment.