I'm a fan of a lot of different kinds of horror. Extreme gory stuff? Sign me up--it doesn't bother me at all. Subtle and creepy haunted house stories? Great! Love it! And honestly, I'm usually not that hard to please. I know what it takes to write a book, so usually I'm able to find something kind to say about almost anything I read, even if it's not quite my cup of tea. To put it another way, I often say that, though I'm pretty hard to really blow away, I'm not that hard to please. So it's with a certain degree of sorrow that I have to report I couldn't really find anything to like about this particular book.
Let's begin with the technical stuff. Some reviewers have complained about the grammar. And I certainly did find a few mistakes, but overall, it wasn't grammatical error that bothered me so much as style. The style (and, indeed, the subject matter, though we'll get to that in a moment) is clearly meant to be evocative of Shirley Jackson's classic works. However, rather than homage, it comes across feeling much more like a vacuous ripoff. Sentences and paragraphs run on far beyond their usefulness. Description is limited to superficial statements. And worst of all, there's not a hint of Jackson's subtlety anywhere in the book.
Significant lengths of the book are devoted to a kind of stream of consciousness rant, which might be somewhat interesting if the book didn't sometimes confuse which point of view was meant to be speaking. It might also be interesting if any of the characters' streams of consciousness were actually interesting, but they're entirely loathsome. And that leads us to the issue of the characters.
To an extent, the characters are not meant to be entirely likable. That's fine. It is a horror novel, so we shouldn't shy away from reading about rather vile people. But while the author claims to have written a book about fascism, it becomes abundantly clear that none of the characters (nor, likely, the author) has the slightest idea what fascism actually is. Instead, the characters come across exactly as they are: hateful people who would sooner engage in self-destructive behavior (and drag everyone else in their proximity down with them) than pause for a moment to try to actually improve anything.
There's a line near the end of the book, during one of the aforementioned rants, in which one of the characters mentions she used to use the website Tumblr. That's telling. The entire book doesn't read so much like a novel as an extended series of Tumblr posts. And I don't mean that in a good way. Before I read that line, the best analogy for the experience of reading this book I could think of was that it seemed a lot like something one of my fellow students in college might have written in a creative writing workshop for no other reason than to try to disturb or get a rise out of the reader.
There's nothing wrong with edginess or brutality in fiction, of course, if there's a point to it--even if that point is simply to make people feel disgust. But here it seems like the book TRIES and FAILS to evoke those feelings of disgust. Almost every line is dripping with hatred, violence, or some other destructive idea, but it doesn't shock the reader so much as make the reader wonder when we're going to get to something interesting. I've read much more extreme and much more brutal books with no problem, but I cared enough about the characters or events that the brutality served the art. Indeed, contrary to the book's reputation, there's not even anything particularly extreme or brutal about it. It has some brutal ideas as its theme, but their reality is never described, hidden instead behind the author's political rants so we never get the opportunity to experience the events through the characters.
One scene in particular, meant to be one of the most brutal and climactic scenes of the story, is written in alternating perspectives, divided into two columns of text. That was an interesting idea to present two viewpoints of the same event, but the experimental format ended up being more distracting than useful and took all the steam out of the one scene that might otherwise have evoked any sense of pathos at all.
And what about being inspired by Shirley Jackson? As I mentioned, her influence is clear throughout, but while Jackson was an expert wordsmith and her works were subtle, nothing could be further from the truth here. It feels ham-fisted rather than subtle and much more puerile than thought-provoking. The ultimate theme of this book is that the "haunted house" is, much like the author's view of England, corrupted by a sort of spirit of fascism. The house is even called Albion to further drive the point home. But on the note of lacking any subtlety, even the connection between the name Albion and England is force-fed to the reader in one of the extended expository rants.
At the end of the day, I really wanted to like this book. We often turn to works of extreme horror because they have the capacity to make us feel. But the only feeling this book managed to evoke was, unfortunately, boredom.
Joe Gore
cesar guzman
Bob Lewis
Jenn (lit.with.jenn)