Dark Banquet by Bill Schutt. Very good so far, however, I doubt I'll be swayed by his case for ticks.
Opening paragraphs:
The ceiling tiles in the abandoned icehouse had fallen long ago, transforming the floor of the cavernous building into a debris-strewn obstacle course. "Hey, it's squishy," I said, stepping gingerly onto a slime-coated chunk just inside the doorway. "Some sort of foam."
"It's probably just asbestos." My wife, Janet, was a terrific field assistant, but I could tell that this place was already giving her a serious case of the creeps. "Yes, but with a protective coating of bat shit," I added, trying to cheer her up. "Let's check it out."
Wallerfield, in north-central Trinidad, had been a center for American military operations in the southern Atlantic during World War II. The land on which it had been built became part of the same Lend-Lease program that had brought Churchill's shell-shocked government fifty outdated American destroyers. Once, it had been the largest and busiest air base in the world, but the English were long gone, as were the Yanks (most of them anyway), and now Wallerfield was an overgrown ruin. Row upon row of prefab buildings had either been carted off in pieces by the locals or reclaimed by the scrubby forests of Trinidad's Central Plain, but because of its cement construction the icehouse was one of the few buildings still standing. Stark white below a mantle of tangled green, the icehouse belonged to bats - tens of thousands of them.
Posted by Caine
