Read this Bucks County author's perfect fall horror novel about — gasp! — apples

Stew is hearty. Liquor is heady. Chocolate is "decadent." So, at least, restaurant dessert menus always tell us.

Apples? They're tempting.

That's their M.O. Just ask Eve. Or Snow White. Or novelist Chuck Wendig — whose 2023 horror novel "Black River Orchard" (Del Rey, New York) is the perfect fall read, rooted in both harvest and Halloween.

"I do think there's something tempting about them. something that's tied with cider production and alcohol, and sugary treats like apple pie," said Wendig, a New Hope-born fantasy writer who has amassed multiple followings with his "Star Wars: Aftermath" series, his "Heartland" trilogy, and a range of other projects on various platforms. He's a blogger, filmmaker, comic book writer, and a prolific novelist whose new book "Monster Movie" dropped September 24. He has another one, "The Staircase in the Woods," coming in April.

But Wendig also has an interesting sideline. He's an apple fiend. He blogs about apples, investigates apples, is obsessed with apples. He was haunted by apples long before he got the idea to actually write a horror novel about them.

Rooted in evil

"Apples are just sort of all over mythology, and our food production," he said. "And I thought, nobody's talking about that. Maybe there's an opportunity here."

Sentient vegetables have a venerable place in horror history, whether they be carnivorous alien plants ("Day of the Triffids"), sinister vines ("The Ruins"), diabolical mushrooms ("The Last of Us"), or seed pods with an agenda ("Invasion of the Body Snatchers"). But of all the villains of the vegetable kingdom, apples have this unique property: they're appetizing. Alluring. People want them.

And that's how, in "Black River Orchard," they get you.

Apple of their eye

The "Ruby Slipper" apple, a strange varietal that turns up in Dan Paxson's family apple orchard, is uncannily delicious. Addictive. People in his Pennsylvania town can't get enough of them.

But these apples have a curious property: they make their eaters more confident, more assertive. To use the current cliché, they turn everyone into "the best version of themselves."

But if the best version of themselves is bad — if they are, in their essence, angry, vengeful, or power-mad people — then the apples are enablers of the worst kind. And the apples, meanwhile, are working to their own evil ends. "The people who are most affected by the apple are really just dialing up what was already in their hearts," Wendig said. "The masks are off."

Whether Calla, Paxson's 17-year-old internet influencer daughter, "apple detective" John Compass (yes, that's a real thing), and a few other plucky souls can stop the apple cult from spreading, is the core — as it were — of this novel that will delight fans of Stephen King, or for that matter, fans of previous Wendig books like "Wanderers" and "The Book of Accidents."

Or anyone who finds plants inherently creepy. As of course, they are.

Greenhouse of horror

"Plants are so alien," Wendig said. "When you hear that this entire grove of Aspen trees is sort of one entity and not multiple trees, or when you hear that Mycelium mushroom networks under the ground maybe allows trees to communicate with each other, that gets as about as alien as you get, outside of viruses. It's pretty bizarre stuff."

Apples are no less disturbing. They are schemers. They want you to eat them. That's how they spread their seeds.

Apples — Wendig's apples — are emblematic of all the forms of temptation that people succumb to. Especially these days, when we often hear about people "giving in," or "not standing up," to this or that political pressure. The MAGA movement, he said, was very much on his mind when he wrote his book.

"Horror only works if it's about character," Wendig said. "The apple is just sort of an inert object. What really matters is how people relate to it, how they're tempted by it, and if they're tempted by it, how they fight back. Throughout history, we've had people who have given in to things, and resisted things. Both politically and just sort of as a general culture thing. I sort of wanted to tie that in to the apple."

Resistance is futile

He himself succumbed to apples years ago.

It was around 2016, he thinks, that he happened to stop in at a farmer's market in Lehigh Valley, and visit a farm stand.

"They had all these bins full of apples, and I'd never heard of a single one of them," he said. "Not ever. And some of the names were so wild and strange, I thought this has to be some kind of joke. Lord Lamborne. Ashmeads Kernel. Cox's Orange Pippin. It sounded like Tolkien stuff. Lord Lambourne sounds like a vampire, for God's sake. So I took one of each of them home, and I wasn't even a huge apple fan at that point. And I went wow, these really taste different than any apple I've ever had."

Supermarkets, he notes, generally only have about 10 or 12 of the more than 700 apple varieties that can be found growing in out-of-the-way orchards, or at rural farm stands. Among those 10 or 12 will invariably be the awesomely mediocre Red Delicious. A "liar apple," he calls it — since it's neither red nor delicious. "It's barely red," he said. "It's almost purple-black."

But of course, Red Delicious were bred, not to taste good, but to look good on supermarket shelves, and to keep over long distances.

That apples have been tampered with, in such ways, is just part of their inherent fascination. Apples, he points out, are colonizers — brought here by Europeans (only the crabapple is native) and very much evolving with us, for better or worse. That's one of the reasons he was anxious to write about them.

"As soon as you start to look into apples, and America's history with apples, and how apples aren't even native here, and all the insane stuff about Johnny Appleseed, and how big agriculture has sort of dominated the apple market and suppressed all the other stuff, and how the FBI during Prohibition was going to get rid of a lot of these apple orchards because they're used to make cider, and instead we want to associate apples with purity and apple pie and not the sin of drinking — the apple is sort of wound into American history.

"Eating all these apples I'd never seen before, heard of before, the writer in me is like, why the hell is that?" he said. "Why is this a thing that exists only in little farmer's markets, or in weird orchards across the country? I just found it fascinating."