Being a fan of eco-horror, when I saw this on Amazon, I just had to get it, and as soon as it came in, I dove right in. Sadly, it was all buzz, no bite.
I was hoping this would be more 1950s giant bug movies and less The Asylum SyFy feature films, but SyFy is what I got from the very beginning. It starts off with a cargo truck crashing and unleashing its cargo, which turns out to be... You guessed it from the title... Killer Flies. But even the worst SyFy movie is more believable than this.
Next to the driver, the first victim of the deadly insects is a little girl, left home alone while her mother goes cavorting into town with her beau. So right off, Sherry, a nobody widowed rancher, isn't going to be nominated for Mother of the Year, yet the author made the weird decision to make her the heroine. Kathy Littlebird (with a name like that, she should have been Native American, but like with so many bad choices the author has made, she isn't), the local reporter, would be a more likely lead character, but after a brief appearance, she's relegated to the background until the third act. Rounding out the cast is the hired hand/love interest, the bully cop who treats everything like it needs to be covered up, the local politician with big Washington dreams, and a very unscientific government scientist.
So back to the story... Sherry is so distraught (not really, but the author says she is, so let's go with it), she vows revenge on whoever or whatever killed her daughter. With the way the sheriff treats her, you'd think he already has some idea as to what's going on, but he's just as clueless as everybody else. The reporter is given the first clue as to what's going on when she investigates a crashed eighteen-wheeler, the driver of which is a runaway teen who, before she dies, mumbles, "Rosebud." Not really, she mumbles the word flies, along with the cryptic message that they killed everybody. Who's everybody? Well, it's the diner full of people that never seem to be discovered because they're never mentioned again. In fact, even though the flies are leaving a trail of bodies, it doesn't seem like any of them are being discovered until the 2,000 people are killed while attending an outdoor opera performance. The reporter is conveniently "dating" the doctor who oversaw the truck driver's body arriving at the hospital, who conveniently knows a government scientist who happens to might be doing work related to the fly attacks. But rather than the reporter and the doctor investigating, it's like they'd rather be fooling around instead of getting to the bottom of things, and Littlebird calls her BFF Sherry and lets her know what she's found out. So Sherry and her hired ranch hand/lover (unbelievably) waltz into the government lab, threaten to make a scene unless they can see the unscientific scientist, and then they're conveniently escorted to see said scientist, who doesn't seem to have a problem spilling his guts. It just gets more far-fetched from there, from the unnecessary sex scenes (because everybody has time to fool around when faced with hordes of man-eating flies, and Sherry, who already has a lover, yet falls in love and sleeps with the scientist [in a matter of days]) that only serve to slow the progression of the story to the unlikely discovery by--You guessed it--Sherry on how to kill the flies (but the author even gets this wrong). I think the funniest thing, though, is Hutch, Sherry's stud, who knows what they're dealing with, running around with a shotgun as if that's the ideal weapon to battle flies.
The book is one misstep after another. It's like the author saw movies like this when he (she, I found out the author is actually a woman) was a kid and only had a vague memory of what actually happened. There was no attempt to verify the "scientific facts" presented in the book, which just makes it all the more laughable. So if you're looking for thrilling eco-horror, keep looking, because this ain't it, which is unfortunate. Sigh. Such high hopes dashed upon the rocks. Oh well... Better luck next time.
