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pasuht's review against another edition
3.0
Stacy, is the perfect wife who lives with her perfect family and her perfect friends in a perfect neighborhood in Las Vegas. 'Everything seemed to follow some sort of formula for a happy life—until the nightmares began.'
Are they prophecies of the coming apocalypse or are they hints at sinister impulses inside Stacy herself? While a psychiatrist's unusual methods bring up more questions than answers, Stacy's body also begins to rebel. The reveal of what's really going on is weirder than anything she could have imagined - and deeply tragic.
The Evolutionist is like reading two very different books at once. In its back and forth between the mundane and the nightmarish it reminded me of Sign Here by Claudia Lux. We start out thinking the mundane is the safe haven, but we get shown slowly and methodically that the real hell is in fact other people. But while I very much enjoy this as a matter of plot structure, in The Evolutionist the two parts also felt written with very different levels of precision and impact.
The elements I loved:
I adored the surrealism and creepiness of the nightmares, visions, hallucinations. Ten out of ten, no notes. They did a perfect job of making me feel not only uneasy, but even physically impacted when Stacy herself was. In a very cosmic horror kind of sense the surreal scenes felt wrong in the best kind of way. I don't want to reveal too much about them and their origins, but I will say those parts alone make it worth picking The Evolutionist up.
The elements I didn't love:
I feel less enthusiastic about the writing when the focus is on Stacy's life in the "real" world. From a conceptual standpoint, they're fine. Trying to figure out medical reasons for supernatural horror is one of my favorite tropes; either because I read The Exorcist when I was way too young or because it reminds me of my lifelong mental health battles - probably both. I also feel that Rena Mason succeeded where The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix failed for me: Making the female friends of the protagonist an unhelpful obstacle without making me think the author just doesn't like their own character or maybe their real life versions.
But the writing of those parts fell very flat for me. Stacy's friends never really separated into distinct characters for me - other than Cally, and only in the last third of the book. Her family felt a little more authentic, but again mostly because of the last hundred pages.
I loved the surreal sequences so much, I'd be willing to excuse the lackluster characterizations in a Watsonian way - maybe they just mirror how Stacy is already disconnecting from her life in our reality - but I can't do that for the many transition scenes from somewhere to somewhere.
We spend so much time with Stacy in her car without any influence on the plot, just filling pages and pages with description of landscape we never go to. Those parts could have been replaced with bringing the social dynamics in Stacy's life into sharper focus. And the driving scenes are a pars pro toto for many other times when I stumbled over descriptions that added pages but not story.
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
Are they prophecies of the coming apocalypse or are they hints at sinister impulses inside Stacy herself? While a psychiatrist's unusual methods bring up more questions than answers, Stacy's body also begins to rebel. The reveal of what's really going on is weirder than anything she could have imagined - and deeply tragic.
The Evolutionist is like reading two very different books at once. In its back and forth between the mundane and the nightmarish it reminded me of Sign Here by Claudia Lux. We start out thinking the mundane is the safe haven, but we get shown slowly and methodically that the real hell is in fact other people. But while I very much enjoy this as a matter of plot structure, in The Evolutionist the two parts also felt written with very different levels of precision and impact.
The elements I loved:
I adored the surrealism and creepiness of the nightmares, visions, hallucinations. Ten out of ten, no notes. They did a perfect job of making me feel not only uneasy, but even physically impacted when Stacy herself was. In a very cosmic horror kind of sense the surreal scenes felt wrong in the best kind of way. I don't want to reveal too much about them and their origins, but I will say those parts alone make it worth picking The Evolutionist up.
The elements I didn't love:
I feel less enthusiastic about the writing when the focus is on Stacy's life in the "real" world. From a conceptual standpoint, they're fine. Trying to figure out medical reasons for supernatural horror is one of my favorite tropes; either because I read The Exorcist when I was way too young or because it reminds me of my lifelong mental health battles - probably both. I also feel that Rena Mason succeeded where The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix failed for me: Making the female friends of the protagonist an unhelpful obstacle without making me think the author just doesn't like their own character or maybe their real life versions.
But the writing of those parts fell very flat for me. Stacy's friends never really separated into distinct characters for me - other than Cally, and only in the last third of the book. Her family felt a little more authentic, but again mostly because of the last hundred pages.
I loved the surreal sequences so much, I'd be willing to excuse the lackluster characterizations in a Watsonian way - maybe they just mirror how Stacy is already disconnecting from her life in our reality - but I can't do that for the many transition scenes from somewhere to somewhere.
We spend so much time with Stacy in her car without any influence on the plot, just filling pages and pages with description of landscape we never go to. Those parts could have been replaced with bringing the social dynamics in Stacy's life into sharper focus. And the driving scenes are a pars pro toto for many other times when I stumbled over descriptions that added pages but not story.
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
themadmaiden's review against another edition
2.0
Well that was a profound disappointment. I ignored the flaws of the writing, way too much diologue for one, at first because it was an interesting premise. The setting was sort of the House Next Door and Silent Hill ish. But then, half way through the entire thing switched genres on me and it's suddenly a sci-fi story about aliens?And she's an alien and everyone on earth died? And I don't even know.
Huge disappointment, it just turned into a story I wasn't interested in.
Huge disappointment, it just turned into a story I wasn't interested in.
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