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booknook(cross-posted from my journal in full)
Not to take the wind out of my own sails, but I am starting this review with the backcover blurb in part because I have already forgotten the characters' names. Besides, we all know blurbs are often marketing lies, but as a horror fan, I find this instance particularly annoying. If you call Leeds "a powerful new voice in horror" and marvel at "how thoroughly [the debut novel] thrums with life", my suspicion is that you are also afraid of brewing your tea too strongly. Somehow, this year I read three (three!) horror novels that dealt with occult music, and all of them were disappointments.
So here's the official synopsis, followed by my thoughts on this book. (Minor spoilers, but you'll probably thank me for dodging this bullet anyway.)
Based on this description, you'd think that this is indeed a horror novel with maybe some family drama sprinkled throughout, right? - But it's not. It's a romance / road movie / melodramatic family drama mash-up with some horror elements. Imagine a trailer hyping you up for a new horror flick but then it's five annoying people aimlessly wandering through a haunted house and bickering until a PG-13 jump scare happens and there's only three of those in the whole movie. It's technically horror but it does not feel like it. At no point when reading this novel did I feel any sense of dread, terror, disgust, creepiness, or even surprise. It does start out strong, with one of the side characters trying to retrieve these haunted records while talking to his dead wife, as he can apparently see and communicate with her ghost. At that point you don't yet know what exactly the character wants and why he can see the dead, but his anxiety conveys that there's more to this than just the fear of getting caught, and you're feeling intrigued by the ghost business. But that momentum does not carry through for the rest of the novel, and then you start noticing flaws, and unfortunately there's nothing of substance to make you overlook those flaws.
I don't usually do bullet-list style reviews, but this novel has so many things adding up.
☠️ As mentioned on the blurb, the dead can "come back" - what this actually means is the records opening a gateway to the afterlife somehow disturbs the usual progress of moving on, so the dead hang around, but only people who have listened to the records can interact with them. This happens to multiple people who died, so their death loses all impact because you can talk to them and chill with them in the car during a road trip to have some heart-to-heart conversation and stuff.
☠️ Wait, did I say only the people who listened to the records can interact with them? But there's also a scene where a group of them clusters in a tight corridor of a hospital making it difficult to get through but apparently not for the regular staff who uses that corridor all the time? And then later a character gives one of the dead their mobile phone and says to call them if anything happens. Okay, so do those dead people have a physical presence in our realm or not?
☠️ So yeah, the worldbuilding is messy. The characterization is also messy. You never quite get a feel for what the supernatural rules are and how it is supposed to come together. One important clue is literally a wild guess that an acquaintance, who happens to be a medium, pulls out of their ass. Like, it's a super long stretch suggesting a motive to the main villain that we haven't seen a single shred of evidence for. The more the book tries to deal with the question of how to get rid of the records or undo the supernatural mess they made, the more confusing it gets. There's another ass-pull with a third supernatural party that comes out of left field. Eventually I just stopped caring entirely. And now this is happening, I said to myself, turning another page. Ok. Why the fuck not.
☠️ The melodrama has a lot to do with Charlie falling in insta-love with Ana, an employée of his father's, who is barely more than the boring record store version of a (non-manic) pixie dream girl. Their romance is as trite as this summary suggests, with Charlie eventually giving off a vibe that he's going to be slotting into the good-natured oaf spot of fictional straight couples that always bores me to tears. And at first Ana does not like him because she worked so hard at turning the record store into a charming-but-modern audiophile meeting space and she's worried Charlie will take it away from her. It's literally You've Got Mail with a record store instead of a book store.
The other issue is indecision on whether Charlie's dad is an asshole or not, which was probably meant as creating a layered character and definitely supposed to deliver some big reveals... but the reveals are only due to convoluted misunderstandings and refusals to mention anything to anyone. I'm sure you know the type - I thought you hated me because you didn't meet me at our favourite spot on my birthday, but it was only because you were preparing a surprise party at my home with my friends, and somehow we had both lost the ability to communicate like normal people. That kind.
☠️ The writing is... acceptable, in a fast food kind of way. Like, I have read worse (way worse) but it's still having its fair share of clunkiness and moments that are just off.
There's a dialogue scene where the editors (there were two!) should have caught that one specific line wasn't supposed to go with character A, but character B instead.
I shall end my review by quoting the most asinine sentence in the whole book. Can't top this premium clunker. Behold:
Not to take the wind out of my own sails, but I am starting this review with the backcover blurb in part because I have already forgotten the characters' names. Besides, we all know blurbs are often marketing lies, but as a horror fan, I find this instance particularly annoying. If you call Leeds "a powerful new voice in horror" and marvel at "how thoroughly [the debut novel] thrums with life", my suspicion is that you are also afraid of brewing your tea too strongly. Somehow, this year I read three (three!) horror novels that dealt with occult music, and all of them were disappointments.
So here's the official synopsis, followed by my thoughts on this book. (Minor spoilers, but you'll probably thank me for dodging this bullet anyway.)
"After his estranged father's mysterious death, Charlie Remick returns to Seattle to help with the funeral. There, he discovers his father left him two parting gifts: the keys to the family record store and a strange black case containing four ancient records that, according to legend, can open a gate to the land of the dead.
When Charlie, his sister, and their two friends play the records, they unwittingly open a floodgate of unspeakable horror. As the darkness descends, they are stalked by a relentless, malevolent force and see the dead everywhere they turn. With time running out, the only person who can help them is Charlie's resurrected father, who knows firsthand the awesome power the records have unleashed. But can they close the gate and silence Schrader's Chord before it's too late?"
Based on this description, you'd think that this is indeed a horror novel with maybe some family drama sprinkled throughout, right? - But it's not. It's a romance / road movie / melodramatic family drama mash-up with some horror elements. Imagine a trailer hyping you up for a new horror flick but then it's five annoying people aimlessly wandering through a haunted house and bickering until a PG-13 jump scare happens and there's only three of those in the whole movie. It's technically horror but it does not feel like it. At no point when reading this novel did I feel any sense of dread, terror, disgust, creepiness, or even surprise. It does start out strong, with one of the side characters trying to retrieve these haunted records while talking to his dead wife, as he can apparently see and communicate with her ghost. At that point you don't yet know what exactly the character wants and why he can see the dead, but his anxiety conveys that there's more to this than just the fear of getting caught, and you're feeling intrigued by the ghost business. But that momentum does not carry through for the rest of the novel, and then you start noticing flaws, and unfortunately there's nothing of substance to make you overlook those flaws.
I don't usually do bullet-list style reviews, but this novel has so many things adding up.
☠️ As mentioned on the blurb, the dead can "come back" - what this actually means is the records opening a gateway to the afterlife somehow disturbs the usual progress of moving on, so the dead hang around, but only people who have listened to the records can interact with them. This happens to multiple people who died, so their death loses all impact because you can talk to them and chill with them in the car during a road trip to have some heart-to-heart conversation and stuff.
☠️ Wait, did I say only the people who listened to the records can interact with them? But there's also a scene where a group of them clusters in a tight corridor of a hospital making it difficult to get through but apparently not for the regular staff who uses that corridor all the time? And then later a character gives one of the dead their mobile phone and says to call them if anything happens. Okay, so do those dead people have a physical presence in our realm or not?
☠️ So yeah, the worldbuilding is messy. The characterization is also messy. You never quite get a feel for what the supernatural rules are and how it is supposed to come together. One important clue is literally a wild guess that an acquaintance, who happens to be a medium, pulls out of their ass. Like, it's a super long stretch suggesting a motive to the main villain that we haven't seen a single shred of evidence for. The more the book tries to deal with the question of how to get rid of the records or undo the supernatural mess they made, the more confusing it gets. There's another ass-pull with a third supernatural party that comes out of left field. Eventually I just stopped caring entirely. And now this is happening, I said to myself, turning another page. Ok. Why the fuck not.
☠️ The melodrama has a lot to do with Charlie falling in insta-love with Ana, an employée of his father's, who is barely more than the boring record store version of a (non-manic) pixie dream girl. Their romance is as trite as this summary suggests, with Charlie eventually giving off a vibe that he's going to be slotting into the good-natured oaf spot of fictional straight couples that always bores me to tears. And at first Ana does not like him because she worked so hard at turning the record store into a charming-but-modern audiophile meeting space and she's worried Charlie will take it away from her. It's literally You've Got Mail with a record store instead of a book store.
The other issue is indecision on whether Charlie's dad is an asshole or not, which was probably meant as creating a layered character and definitely supposed to deliver some big reveals... but the reveals are only due to convoluted misunderstandings and refusals to mention anything to anyone. I'm sure you know the type - I thought you hated me because you didn't meet me at our favourite spot on my birthday, but it was only because you were preparing a surprise party at my home with my friends, and somehow we had both lost the ability to communicate like normal people. That kind.
☠️ The writing is... acceptable, in a fast food kind of way. Like, I have read worse (way worse) but it's still having its fair share of clunkiness and moments that are just off.
"One by one, they entered and formed a horseshoe pattern around the foot of Ellie's bed."
"He remembered all the things he wouldn't have been able to remember had he spent his time with her talking."
There's a dialogue scene where the editors (there were two!) should have caught that one specific line wasn't supposed to go with character A, but character B instead.
I shall end my review by quoting the most asinine sentence in the whole book. Can't top this premium clunker. Behold:
"Her eyes, a gray soup of death, held him gently."
no subject
Date: 2024-10-20 07:23 pm (UTC)This isn't horror, but it does have some horror-ish vibes: have you read Greg Bear's The Infinity Concerto (and its sequel The Serpent Mage)? The caveat here is that it goes in on a version of spooky/dangerous Sidhe that are (in the world of the books) what got echoed down in human Christian? religion (e.g. a Sidhe named Adonna -> Adonai, the Serpent Mage as the serpent from Genesis??) if that's something you want to avoid; but mostly it goes in on a somewhat creepy/spooky portal fantasy around this mystical/magical piece of music, with some really beautiful and creepy writing - the more so since I'd been more familiar with Greg Bear via his science fiction.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-21 08:03 am (UTC)Same! How did this get published!
I don't think I've ever read anything by Greg Bear? I'll check out what he's written, and I'm always grateful for recommendations even if they might not be up my alley. There's so much I'd otherwise never hear of!
no subject
Date: 2024-10-20 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-20 08:11 pm (UTC)