Noro by William F. Gray

Publication Date: Feb. 21, 2025 | Cemetery Dance | 132 pages

Mark Twain wrote in his autobiography that “There is no such thing as a new idea. … We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.” Meanwhile, film critic Gene Siskel once advised filmmakers not to take time out of their picture to remind audiences of other, better flicks they could be watching instead, such as when characters are shown watching a well-known scene from a piece of highly regarded cinema, or the camera knowingly lingers on a movie theater’s marquee. We shouldn’t be reminded that we could be watching The Shining when we’re stuck sitting through Drop Dead Fred.

These two axioms were at the forefront of my mind when reading William F. Gray’s Noro. Noro involves a meteor carrying an alien parasite crashing into the Wyoming woods in the middle of a savagely violent snowstorm. A young man named Con goes to investigate, but his German Shepard, Doc, gets away from him and ends up infected. Mayhem ensues, and Con’s neighbor Jonah, and his dog Noro, are caught up in the mix and struggling to survive. Noro — the book, not the dog — is a mishmash of familiar ideas and concepts, a kaleidoscope of influences that are ultimately better on their own than stitched together as they are here. Gray borrows from works like John Carpenter’s The Thing and the Alien flicks, along with Stephen King’s Cujo and Dreamcatcher, and tries to take various components from each of these to create a slick horror novella that never feels as fresh as any of its inspirations. Not even Dreamcatcher.

Somewhere along the way, Noro reminded me of a third axiom: familiarity breeds contempt. I’ve read so many similar scenes and set-pieces as Gray’s elsewhere plenty of times before, or seen them played out in movies and television, that having them all appear here in mandatory checklist fashion left me bored. It’s all so rote and dull. We have the requisite bit involving one human survivor getting infected and hiding it. The creature that was thought dead turns out to not be so dead after all and springs back to life. And, of course, as these types of horror stories often do, it ends with a cliffhanger indicating that not only has nothing been truly resolved, but the worst is just getting started.

To his credit, Gray spares little expense in doling out the violence, and Noro is consistently at its best when it’s at its bloodiest. Given that good doggo Doc is infected early on, it probably comes as little surprise that there is a plethora of both human and animal violence. Doc’s infection is gruesomely detailed as the alien parasite sets up residence inside the dog’s body and makes itself at home, and then proceeds to attack Con and Jonah both, chasing them through the woods intent on chomping the hell out of them both.

Readers sensitive to harm brought against animals may want to avoid Noro given the merciless violence inflicted upon Con’s canine companion, but for me that wasn’t even the worst of it. No, the true horror, and what ultimately drew my contempt into outright anger, was Noro’s editing, or rather the complete lack of it. When reviewing advance reader copies, reviewers aren’t supposed to get hung up on typos and textual errors. Most ARCs are even labeled as an “Uncorrected Proof” to warn potential reviewers that the book hasn’t yet gone through the rigorous process of editing and proofreading. However, most publishers do their best to present their advance readers with a book that is mostly polished and largely representative of what will soon be hitting bookstores. I can count on one hand the number of ARCs I’ve had to quit simply because they were so riddled with typos. That Noro comes out in less than a month and this recently-supplied ARC is so positively riddled with errors is absolutely mind-boggling to me. At only 132 pages, it’s beyond absurd that every few pages there are enough typos, and missing or repetitious words or phrases to make reading Noro a downright painful experience. It upset me, and I spent much of my time reading Noro in an active state of hostility toward the text. Even the table of contents on my electronic galley has a mistake, for fuck’s sake! Some examples: In one instance, we’re told that Doc’s one remaining eye remained locked on Con. In another, after Doc has tackled Con to the ground and is face to face with the man, Gray writes that “The snapping of Doc’s jaws sounded impossibly close…” This isn’t impossibly close, dear readers — IT IS CLOSE! Later, Jonah chides himself over a 20-year-old first aid kit and not having the foresight to buy a new one sooner, if not a long a time ago. If the issue is the kit being old to begin with, why would he want to have bought one an even longer time ago? Another time, Gray finds Doc’s wet, bloody, snow-covered fur to be of such importance that he proceeds to tell us about it for two sentences in a row in nearly the exact same way. In addition to a number of other goofs, like odd sentence constructs, inserting words that shouldn’t be there or forgetting to include words that would make a sentence sensible, and occasionally not knowing when to use “an” before a word beginning with a vowel, I found myself having to spend far too much of my time trying to make actual sense of what I was reading and trying to decipher what the author was attempting to say. I was often and repeatedly yanked out of the story by one glaring mistake after another. If I had received a printed copy of Noro in this condition, I would have thrown that damn thing across the room in a fit of anger a dozen times or more.

I can only hope that the version of Noro Cemetery Dance releases for sale has been significantly cleaned up and corrected, otherwise they should be embarrassed to sell this in its current condition. I would also advise potential readers looking to add this to their collection to verify that Noro has, indeed, been properly edited before purchasing. Reading this uncorrected ARC of Noro is like watching a new big-budget blockbuster, only one in which the director and editor forgot to remove all the bloopers and ruined takes before the premiere. I will admit that this sloppy mess severely clouded my opinion of Noro well before I even hit the half-way mark (I debated DNFing this book numerous times due to the total lack of editorial oversight, but stuck with it simply to kill time until the Tuesday release of another title I was highly anticipating), but given Gray’s slavish devotion to presenting familiar tropes in ways that have already been done to death it wouldn’t have been by much. This is a B-movie type of book given a D- presentation. On the bright side, I don’t expect I’ll ever have to read about glittens quite so frequently ever again.