The Creeping Charlies is a 2022 psychological horror novella, written by French-Canadian author Rebecca Maye Holiday and published by Sea Holly Books. The book is set in the fictional town Charogne Falls in the province of Quebec, and is narrated by a Canadian girl named Colette Charlie, nicknamed "Collie Charlie". Charogne Falls is isolated due to an accident at a pesticides factory releasing a poison into the air. The poison causes people to decay slowly, obsessing over the killing of non-human animals and destroying any inanimate, sentimental objects around them. According to Collie, they are not zombies, just mutated, which she tells herself in the hope that there may be a cure. Her brother, Pierre, works as a "liquidator" at the factory. While Collie gets bused into a nearby town for school, as a resident of Charogne Falls she is forced to wear a face mask during classes, and her parents hope to move out of Charogne Falls altogether, but their student loan debt prevents it until they find a relative they can move in with.
An eBook version of the book was announced a year later, and is set to be released by American company Lulu in 2023.
The book contains examples of the following tropes:
- Big Brother Mentor: Pierre Charlie... at first.
- Chronic Pet Killer: Anybody in Charogne Falls affected by the poison goes on to kill and eat live animals with their bare hands, including family pets.
- Creepy Child: Collie's best friend, a girl named Sasha LaFleur, is lethargic, obsessed with slaughtering the neighbour's dog next-door, and apparently is so decayed that she has many bugs and spiders crawling around in her open mouth.
- Insane Equals Violent: This is true for everyone in Charogne Falls; the poison from the pesticides factory induces a mutation in their brain and cells causing them to decay and violently attack animals. There is no real variance in this. Pretty much every affected resident becomes this way until their body physically rots and they die.
- Lost Pet Grievance: Happens to the Charlie family when Collie's siamese cat, Cucumber, is dragged away in the night by her neighbours and slaughtered. Weirder still, the neighbours write an apology note and leave it on the Charlie family's doorstep, along with a basket of fruit.
- No Antagonist: There really is no antagonist or bad being in the story, only an abstract idea.
- Our Zombies Are Different: Or, according to Collie Charlie, not even zombies at all, while she then lists the typical zombie tropes that the people of Charogne Falls don't fit.
- Student Debt Plot: The Charlies are trapped in the literally poisonous town of Charogne Falls because Collette and Pierre's parents can't move due to their student debt unless they find a relative to live with.
- Town with a Dark Secret: Collie learns from her parents that the pesticides factory was really a military experiment forced into Canada by the United States, testing illegal biological and chemical weaponry that could, in theory, be released on a major city in an enemy territory. The accident in Charogne Falls shows a small-scale version of what could have been a much bigger disaster if the poison was ever released as a weapon of war.
