Lydia Schoch

Title: Horsefly

Author: Mireille Gagné

Publisher: Coach House Books

Publication Date: May 20, 2025

Genres: Horror, Science Fiction, Contemporary, Historical

Length: 171 pages

Source: I borrowed it from the library.

Rating: 4 Stars

Blurb:

A terrifying tale about the ways in which we try to dominate nature, and how nature will, inevitably, wreak retribution upon us.

In 1942, a young entomologist, Thomas, is sent to a remote island to work on biological weapons for the Allied military. The scientists live like prisoners while they look for the perfect carrier for anthrax among the island’s many insects.

In 2024, in the same region of Quebec, a heat wave unleashes swarms of horseflies while humans fall prey to strange flights of rage. Theodore is living a simple life, working double shifts and drinking to forget, when a horsefly bite stirs him from his apathy and he impulsively kidnaps from the nursing home his grandfather Emeril, whose dementia has him living in the past during the Grosse Ile biological weapons experiments.

The horsefly, meanwhile, knows a few secrets…

Content Warning: Horseflies, brief references to the damage these bugs do to a body when they bite you, an insect-born pandemic, and dementia.

Review:

Anger is only the first step.

Poetic is just about the last word I’d associate with horseflies, so it was a wonderful surprise to discover just how beautifully the horsefly in this story described their life. Kudos to the author for writing these scenes so descriptively and smoothly. I genuinely felt as if I were exploring the world through the perspective of a creature that, while highly intelligent and certainly not what a real horsefly would sound like if they could talk, also experienced life in a radically different way than how a human would describe those same events. This sort of storytelling takes talent, and it makes me want to read everything else Ms. Gagné has written or will write in the future.

It would have been helpful to have more action scenes. So much time was spent talking about the characters’ thoughts and feelings that I sometimes grew a little restless as I was reading. There was plenty of space to explore topics like what else the government did in response to this project once they realized it had some horrifying side effects or how the sickness that caused uncontrollable rage was affecting human society. Even a little more attention to such things would have made it easy for me to choose a five star rating.

Don’t let the horror tag scare you off if this isn’t a genre you typically read. The frights in this story were real but mostly happened off-screen or developed slowly in my imagination as I pieced together what happened on that remote island to make horseflies suddenly so dangerous. I thought that was a refreshing way to approach topics like pandemics and how messing around too much with the natural world can go terribly wrong. Many storytellers write these these tales from the perspectives of innocent people who suddenly must confront something they don’t understand instead of sharing the origins of these diseases from the perspectives of the people  and the horseflies who created it or helped to spread it. When combined with the smooth writing style I complimented earlier, this made for a creative reading experience.

Horsefly was a thoughtful and deliciously scary piece of xenofiction.