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A review by themermaddie
Daphne by Josh Malerman
2.0
listen, i see the vision, it just didn't work for me.
daphne is very much striving to be the next cultural horror movie icon, but i just didn't find her as scary as she thinks she is. i found the writing style interesting at first, i liked the way malerman jumps back and forth between flashbacks/recollections/lore and present day, i thought it felt very seamless, but after a while it just started to get old and it dragged a little. malerman really nails the small town claustrophobia vibes as well as the general tension and suspense, but it also felt very stagnant at times. i liked how many povs we got bc it made the town feel very populated and tightly knit, but that also meant that a lot of the book is just cutting to what different characters are doing at the same time. also there's like just enough supernatural elements in here to make you double take, but not quite enough to actually spook me.
this felt very much like a concept horror movie, but like not in a good way. for quite a lot of it you could make the reasonable assumption that daphne is a metaphor for the way anxiety can be debilitating because the more you think about it the more it affects you until you feel like you're dying, and even through all the murders i started to wonder if there would even be an explanation that made sense. when the girls start getting crushed by an unseen force, it just started to get a bit goofy for me. i kept waiting for some kind of interesting twist; maybe the legends about daphne got something wrong, or maybe the locals all unfairly demonised her, or maybe the circumstances of her death were worse than originally thought, or just like SOMETHING. but instead nah, daphne is literally just a weirdo who was murdered by the basketball team and it turns out that that's okay and actually justified bc she's a cannibal i guess? so everything we heard about her in the legends was just?? true?? i also can't prove it but i feel like there's some element of transphobia in the way that she's constantly being described as a large hulking woman with huge hands who hides her face with grotesque makeup, etc etc etc. it's never explicitly transphobic or anything but there's a common refrain about how she was so huge that officials assume that only a man could be that large, except the girls basketball team is insistent that the culprit could also be a woman. is that trans allyship or a hate crime. idk who knows. anyway i just feel like a legend that turns out to be basically entirely true plus extra more horrible stuff isn't very compelling bc it's just so?? straightforward? like what you see is exactly what you get, but with extra steps bc coach wanda is involved also, which i did not see coming and didn't find to be particularly well set up. the ending makes it so that kit literally defeats daphne by standing up to her own anxiety, so forgive me if the entire book feels like a ham-fisted way to describe the all-consuming nature of anxiety/depression/generational trauma with all the subtlety of a loaded gun.
vibes were alright i guess
daphne is very much striving to be the next cultural horror movie icon, but i just didn't find her as scary as she thinks she is. i found the writing style interesting at first, i liked the way malerman jumps back and forth between flashbacks/recollections/lore and present day, i thought it felt very seamless, but after a while it just started to get old and it dragged a little. malerman really nails the small town claustrophobia vibes as well as the general tension and suspense, but it also felt very stagnant at times. i liked how many povs we got bc it made the town feel very populated and tightly knit, but that also meant that a lot of the book is just cutting to what different characters are doing at the same time. also there's like just enough supernatural elements in here to make you double take, but not quite enough to actually spook me.
this felt very much like a concept horror movie, but like not in a good way. for quite a lot of it you could make the reasonable assumption that daphne is a metaphor for the way anxiety can be debilitating because the more you think about it the more it affects you until you feel like you're dying, and even through all the murders i started to wonder if there would even be an explanation that made sense. when the girls start getting crushed by an unseen force, it just started to get a bit goofy for me. i kept waiting for some kind of interesting twist; maybe the legends about daphne got something wrong, or maybe the locals all unfairly demonised her, or maybe the circumstances of her death were worse than originally thought, or just like SOMETHING. but instead nah, daphne is literally just a weirdo who was murdered by the basketball team and it turns out that that's okay and actually justified bc she's a cannibal i guess? so everything we heard about her in the legends was just?? true?? i also can't prove it but i feel like there's some element of transphobia in the way that she's constantly being described as a large hulking woman with huge hands who hides her face with grotesque makeup, etc etc etc. it's never explicitly transphobic or anything but there's a common refrain about how she was so huge that officials assume that only a man could be that large, except the girls basketball team is insistent that the culprit could also be a woman. is that trans allyship or a hate crime. idk who knows. anyway i just feel like a legend that turns out to be basically entirely true plus extra more horrible stuff isn't very compelling bc it's just so?? straightforward? like what you see is exactly what you get, but with extra steps bc coach wanda is involved also, which i did not see coming and didn't find to be particularly well set up. the ending makes it so that kit literally defeats daphne by standing up to her own anxiety, so forgive me if the entire book feels like a ham-fisted way to describe the all-consuming nature of anxiety/depression/generational trauma with all the subtlety of a loaded gun.
vibes were alright i guess