Review: The Ultimate Urban Legend Come to Light
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 21, 2014
No city is more urban than the Big Apple, and perhaps the quintessential New York City urban legend is the tale of a tribe of people living deep in the subway tunnels beneath the city. That tale became the basis of the classic cult TV series Beauty and the Beast, and it now forms the basis of Evan Light's clever little horror story, The Mole People Beneath the City.Fittingly, Light's story revolves around the telling of a story about underground dwellers The story's unnamed narrator and his young daughter are taking the subway home late at night when the daughter expresses fear of being attacked by the mole people. When some of the other passengers on the train, a group of Midwestern college kids, ask him about it, the narrator tells them about how another subway car had been stopped dead in its tracks and boarded by some mysterious passengers a few nights earlier. Naturally, the other passengers express skepticism whether that really happened or whether another typical New Yorker is trying to have some fun at the expense of gullible out-of-towners.A lot of writers would have played this premise perfectly straight, without any extraneous story telling and just depict the passengers being attacked. Light's approach is far more clever and potentially suspenseful in the Hitchcock manner. The audience is meant to wonder, just as the tourists do, whether someone's pulling their leg as the tension builds.Unfortunately, Light is a bit too obvious in the clues he leaves during the buildup, so that it's pretty clear that the tourists are in for a nasty shock, and when the shock does come, it's not as shocking for the readers as it should be. Still, it's gruesome enough for a short story, and Light adds a clever touch by having the narrator's daughter play a key part in the proceedings.A good horror writer leaves things to the reader's imagination rather than providing graphically clinical detail. Light again demonstrates his ability to take maximum advantage of the short story format. He provides us with just enough details to suggest what's going on beneath the surface of the city and then allows our imagination to fill in the details of what's going to happen after the story ends. Let's just say I wouldn't want to actually be reading this story on a subway at night.