Reviews

I received an advance copy of this book with my most recent Indiespensable shipment. Upon seeing the unique packaging and reading the blurb on the back, I was really excited to read it. The story sounded creepy and intriguing, so I began reading it right away. Unfortunately, it was neither of those things.

The plot held a lot of promise, but after setting up a spooky situation (odd scenes from apparent home movies are somehow spliced onto video tape rentals), the story veers off to follow different characters. Their actions eventually come together, but those separate storylines by themselves are quite dull. Ultimately, I don't think I really had a sense of who any of the characters were or why they were doing what they were doing. Their choices often seemed odd and unbelievable. At the end of the book, when all of the threads were woven together, I found myself thinking two things: "Yeah, right," and "So what?" The big reveal fell quite flat and the separate storylines felt forced together.

The only thing that could have saved a book like this would have been especially beautiful writing that I could admire independently of the plot and characters it was attached to. This book didn't have that either.

punkrockingnerd's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

It's pretty good! Definitely fits the "Kentucky Route Zero" vibe, and that's always appreciated, but I feel like I need to read it again to fully understand it all, you know?

hp_reading's review against another edition

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3.0

I like books that are clever and have an interesting structure, but I don't like to feel confused when I finish. And confused in such a way that I don't even know where to start if I wanted to figure it out. This book was interestingly written and very vivid, but like the situation the characters are in in the book, everything feels disjointed and not enough information - just enough to keep you interested to finish. This is one of those books where I would like to read it in a class so that I had people I could progressively unpack it with because I think I've missed a lot of things. Getting to the end, I think I would like to go back and read it knowing what I know now, but unfortunately I don't feel invested in the characters enough to do so.
Overall very interesting, but just not the book for me.

lexi1001's review

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medium-paced

2.25

drewweber's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.25

lamphouse's review against another edition

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4.0

really 3.5 but rounded up out of respect for the man. the pov changes were a little clunky at times, but something about the way darnielle describes things in such seemingly simple ways makes everything just a touch more terrifying, and a touch more saddening as well. it's full of a bleak mystery, then a bleak, creeping horror, and then an equally bleak hope (that, to be fair, i didn't feel was fully cohesive, but that's another story). the ending felt a bit strained, the hope that it points towards made less effective by its brief resurgences earlier on with other characters jumping ahead in time, but the getting there was so good i barely cared.

yesterday i was talking to my friend about thriller books and this in particular, about how i can watch hours and hours of scary movies and never once experience the same kind of fear or edge-of-my-seat, staring-at-a-slow-motion-trainwreck thrall i get from a good book. with films, if i turn it off, i don't have to think about it anymore. sure the good ones stay with you, give you images to linger over in the space between flicking the lights off and getting into bed, but books are different. you're half of the creation—the story gives you the words, the general look, a specific here and there, but you fill in the rest. the image is yours, created with the bits and pieces your brain knows will best make it stick, and you can never just turn that off. on page 29, after jeremy first watches the clip in she's all that and is trying to go to sleep, he talks about how the scene won't leave his head, "How it sped up and slowed down as his brain tried to find some context within which to situate it. The image seeking out and finding the internal circuits where it would be able to live forever. The figure under the canvas, rising." that's the feeling i'm talking about—except here, it doesn't have to find the circuits. it came from them in the first place. being an active participant in the visualization is what makes "She, or he, wears a canvas bag for a hood" (22) so terrifying all on its own, and what makes the shadows lurking in the corners, the things you know are just there out of sight, enough to paralyze you as though you were in the one in the dark.

anyway, i really enjoyed this. i'm a big fan of the mountain goats, and specifically john darnielle's lyrical prowess, so i was really really pleased to see that that same skill translated into prose. (every time i explained who the author was when someone asked what i was reading, they all said that it makes sense he would be a good novelist as well as lyricist? which is silly—they're drastically different forms. count me definitively impressed, mr. darnielle. cheers.)

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