The plot of Mad Dog, Kelly Watt’s first novel, seems designed to be a quick pitch: it is 1964, and 14-year-old Sheryl-Anne is living with her uncle Fergus on his apple orchard, deep in the heart of Ontario’s Eden Valley. The setting is self-consciously paradisiacal – the already unsubtle connection between apples and the name of the valley is made explicit at least three times – but there is trouble looming in the background: missing kids, skinned cats, race riots, Vietnam, DDT, etc. Sheryl-Anne is troubled by vivid nightmares, and she longs for the mother who abandoned her as an infant.

One day Fergus brings home a rough-but-sensitive hitchhiker named Peter, who dreams of becoming a famous folksinger, and who looks like “that dead kid,” James Dean. The apple orchard is soon revealed to be the home of an apocalyptic cult centred around Fergus, who immerses his flock in drugs, sex, porn, sacrificial ritual, and black magic.

The campiness and sheer hysteria of Watt’s scenario can be partially forgiven. After all, Stephen King – whose influence lurks behind Mad Dog’s numerous italicized, present-tense stretches of phantasmagoria – is not known for his devotion to quiet narrative plausibility. But the fun of King’s books are always found in their being compulsively readable. Despite the overabundance of dark portents and some genuinely creepy moments, Watt’s narrative lacks hooks. Her prose is soggy where it should crackle. Many incidental scenes crawl forward with sluggish reluctance, while the climax slips by as a near-summary of itself.

The characters are also weak. Peter barely registers and is given little to do or say. Fergus’s dark charisma is never demonstrated, only asserted. And though Sheryl-Anne is the novel’s central character and consciousness, she lags far behind the reader in assessing the worsening situation at the orchard. Despite the violence and evil surrounding her, Sheryl-Anne never breaks out of an adolescent mope, which makes for a very slow read.