Crystal Lake Publishing / March 2022
Reviewed By: Vince A. Liaguno

The novella format has gained popularity in recent years—not quite requiring the commitment of a novel yet allowing the reader to spend time with a tale and its characters a little longer than a short story. Stephen King has made good use of the format over the course of his career, crafting full-length works by pulling together a handful of novellas like he did with Different Seasons (Viking Press, 1982), Four Past Midnight (Viking Press, 1990), Hearts in Atlantis (Scribner, 1999), and If It Bleeds (Scribner, 2020). Likewise, Mark Allen Gunnells has revisited the novella format over the course of his still-burgeoning career with The Summer of Winters (Evil Jester Press, 2013), Fort (Sinister Grin Press, 2015), and the more recent 2B (Valhalla Books, 2021).

Gunnells employs the novella format for his latest, When It Rains, the events of which take place over the course of three hours on the campus of a fictional South Carolina university. It’s the perfect structure for the pacing required and allows Gunnells to move the story along at a brisk clip. When an anomalous downpour of malodorous, gelatinous precipitation begins to fall, various denizens of Friedkin University take sanctuary inside the campus bookstore and café. As the ragtag ensemble watch with growing horror as the rain spreads worldwide, paranoia-filled survivalist instincts kick in and sentiments among the group begin to fracture. With the origins of the weird rainfall an unknown, media reports begin to fuel a growing panic within the bookstore of contagion. Are those who were caught in the rain at risk for some unknown infection —and, more importantly to those who managed to stay dry—is whatever they might have contracted transmissible? It’s this slowly-percolating dilemma that fuels the emotional core of Gunnells’ tale and gives him a wide berth to comment on the self-preserving nature of human beings pushed to the brink during times of uncertainty.

In case the influences on When It Rains aren’t clear from the outset, Gunnells namechecks a few of them for the reader—namely, the famous Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” and, most obviously, King’s novella The Mist, first published in 1980’s Dark Forces: New Stories of Suspense and Supernatural Horror before the edited version that appeared in his 1985 collection Skeleton Crew. Like The Mist, Gunnells populates When It Rains with a combination of stock characters (the bookstore employees, the loud-mouthed know-it-all, an elderly couple) and some wholly original characters like Tony and Vincent, a gay couple for whom remorse for an undiscovered infidelity drives a final act of selflessness, or the older closeted professor who takes a student with considerable daddy issues under his proverbial wing in their shared quest to survive.

Gunnells opts for short passages told from the alternating viewpoints of the various characters to propel his narrative forward, a wise choice considering the size of his ensemble and the short window of time over which the events of When It Rains take place. There’s an urgency, a momentum that he’s able to establish from the outset and skillfully maintain throughout the novella. He manages a whopper of a twist during the story’s finale that no reader will see coming and then cleverly adds a thoughtful epilogue that reminds readers of the very human toll this story has taken on its characters.

When It Rains is an excellent reminder of the old adage about good things coming in small packages. Gunnells adroitly presents the central moral dilemma in such a way that the reader both understands and empathizes with the difficult consensus reached while simultaneously reviling those coming to said consensus. Insightfully, Gunnells shows us that humanity and inhumanity lie somewhere along a spectrum and that the sliding scale of our decisions is often fraught with moral ambiguity and lots of gray space in between the extremes.

Purchase When It Rains by Mark Allen Gunnells.