They prefer their meat rare.
"The aporkaclaypse is a trifle hammy but those who want to pig out on horror could do worse than this slaughterfest which brings home the bacon. It's Hameggdon-time in a small Arizona town which learns quickly its hogs are no boar but ready to gorge themselves on the inhabitants. More finicky readers of frights may feel giving this book a high rating is putting pearls before swine but this book is not swill for the trough either. So polk your head on down to the pen and pick up Tuskers, a novel of butchery which will leave you wishing someone would turn these mutant suidae into sausage."
— C.T. Phipps' review on The United Federation of Charles.
Barry had created a little piece of paradise in his southern Arizona backyard—until the javelinas came. His battle to rid his property of the wild pigs soon escalated into war. Too late, he realized these weren't ordinary animals. They were something new, something meaner and smarter. These pigs weren't just at war with him; they were at war with the human race.
And the humans were losing.
Duncan Mcgeary says he was inspired by a 'nature strikes back' theme. "We keep pushing nature and it's going to backfire on us someday. We are pushing into natural places, and the wildlife is either adapting or dying. My idea [with TUSKERS] is that someday they are going to mutate or adapt in a way that is dangerous to humans."
Tuskers is the first volume in Duncan Mcgeary's Wild Pig Apocalypse series, published by Ragnarok Publications. Its sequel, Tuskers II: Day of the Long Pig was released in May of 2015.
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Tuskers
- Action Girl: Barbara is one of the few humans to put up a decent fight.
- The Adventure Continues: One of the deceased leaves some of the survivors a vast fortune to continue hunting the super-intelligent pigs.
- Animal Testing: What, ultimately, creates the Tuskers in the first place.
- Always Chaotic Evil: All of the Tuskers, uniformly, desire the genocide of humans.
- Attack of the Killer Whatever: Attack of the killer super-intelligent pigs!
- Big Bad: Razorback is the leader of the Tuskers.
- B-Movie: The novel seems to be an homage to these, specifically Deep Blue Sea and Tremors.
- Developing Doomed Characters: Much of the first half of the book is about establishing the townsfolk about to get eaten.
- Disaster Movie: Overlaps between this and Attack of the Killer Whatever.
- Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Or, in this case, bad pigs. Razorback is motivated by his desire to please his human-hating mother.
- I Am a Humanitarian: The Tuskers desire manflesh!
- Heroic Sacrifice: Barbara is willing to make one of these. Arguably, it's also a Senseless Sacrifice Driven to Suicide moment.
- Intellectual Animal: "They're ***ing pig Einsteins! Every last one of them." One of the book's more memorable lines.
- It Can Think: A revelation to a number of humans when they encounter the tactics of the Tuskers.
- Kill All Humans: The motivations of the Tuskers.
- Kill It with Fire: A gigantic explosion and misusing of the Tusker's herding powers is what finally does their plan in.
- Incredibly Lame Pun: One of the characters say it's the aporkcalypse and hamageddon.
- The End... Or Is It?: One of the Tuskers got away and is making plans. BIG PLANS.
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The townsfolk's nicknames for the Tuskers.
- Police Are Useless: Played with as the emergency response for a "wild pig invasion" is rather tepid. It later gets into gear.
- Recycled In Space: A Downplayed Trope example as it is pretty much Deep Blue Sea in Arizona and with pigs. The thing is, those are pretty big changes.
- Red Baron: The townsfolk name the Tuskers in order to personify them. There's Razorback, Himmler, and Vader amongst others.
- Refuge in Audacity: Arguably, the point of this book.
- Uplifted Animal: The reason the Tuskers are so dangerous to humans.
Tuskers II: Day of the Long Pig
- Big Bad: Genghis is the leader of the evil Tuskers.
- Defector from Decadence: A good number of the 3rd generation Tuskers really want no part of a war with humanity for a variety of reasons.
- Final Solution: Genghis plans one of these for humanity. It, instead, happens to the Tuskers instead.
- Gaia's Vengeance: A lot of humans speculate the Tuskers are naturally evolved as a means of nature combating human pollution. Subverted when the Tuskers state, no, they were created by human science.
- Genre Shift: It goes from an animals-attack horror novel to a more Planet of the Apes-esque science fiction story.
- The ending reveals the Tuskers and humans are about to be attacked by zombie humans and pigs.
- Guilt-Free Extermination War: Averted. The humans question whether it's right to destroy a new species and the 3rd generation Tuskers feel the same way.
- Gray-and-Gray Morality: In contrast to the previous novel, neither the Tuskers nor the humans really have the moral highground.
- Intellectual Animal: Continued from the previous book but actually true as the pigs who learn about human science, history, and philosophy quickly become more proficient at it than humanity.
- It Can Think: Again by humans unfamiliar with Tuskers. One-upped when they start speaking.
- The Plague: One of these is unleashed by the humans on the Tuskers. It wipes all of the evil ones out but leaves the more likable ones alive.
- Private Military Contractors: Barry assembles a group of these to fight the Tuskers. They're decent people, though, who don't really want to kill all the Tuskers once they find out they're intelligent.
- Psychic Powers: The Tuskers develop these as their intelligence grows. This gives them control over Coyotes and ravens.
- Suicidal Overconfidence: What many of the 3rd generation Tuskers think Genghis is suffering from given their notation of how drastically humanity outnumbers them as well as how powerful their weapons are. They're correct as a relatively small numnber of humans all but wipes out their race.
- Talking Animal: The Tuskers develop the ability to speak English as a function of their psychic powers which really changes the nature of their relationship with humans.
- The Quisling: Those humans who are forced by the Tuskers into assisting them. Only one of them really qualifies, though.
- What Measure Is a Non-Cute?: The Tuskers aren't exactly adorable until they start getting names like Tesla and Petunia.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: One of the things the humans have to cope with regarding the Tuskers.
