Doesn't promise much more than a low-brow gore-soaked tribute to 1980's movies like The Evil Dead, The Thing or The Blob, but even with those lowered ambitions I can't really say this is good. There's a way to make references to pop culture without being obnoxious but Cesare never really figures it out. He always drags out references a couple beats too far. When describing a scene as something horrific he can't just say "It was a sight only Edgar Allan Poe could do justice to." he has to give a paragraph like this:

"Billy suddenly head the voice of Vivian Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire: "Only Poe. Only Mr. Edgar Allan Poe could do justice to it." That was what Blanche had said in the movie. Billy thought Poe was one of a few names who could do justice to this situation, the one that had developed here on Long Island, in his town, on his street, and was now concluding in Rachel Krieger's living room. Craven, Raimi, Carpenter, Gordon, maybe Henenlotter or even Ed Wood, the guy who made those terrible flicks; any of those guys could also have constructed a scene like this."

He has a tendency to overqualify everything, he can't just have a situation remind a character of a horror movie they've seen, he has to also provide an aside where the character gives their opinion on that movie, like he's desperate to prove to the prospective reader that he has good taste in horror flicks.

The best part of the book is the early parts of the story where the characters know something weird is happening around their town but can't put it together. Little glimpses of an invasion in progress that's much larger in scope than we've been shown (love the eerie potential of a strangely empty mall) are very fun, but it never builds to much because the book doesn't know how to end and basically wraps up on a cliffhanger. If you want a quick read with a bunch of gleefully arbitrary gore moments (good luck figuring out what the biology of these aliens are, their bodies seem to just do whatever is grossest in any given moment) this isn't the worst thing in the world. But if you want to care about a single character or a story with pay-off, skip it.