ritawilbur 's review for:

The Changeling by Victor LaValle

5.0

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Oh wow, after a string of several middling reads, this book is giving me a book hangover! It’s the best from Lavalle that I’ve read yet! The book was slow getting started. I kept wondering where the horror was. But I really liked Apollo and hearing how he got his start as a book dealer, meeting Emma, his fatherhood. Then events started moving along. There were twists and turns, and I was constantly kept guessing: what is the meaning of these events, who can be trusted, what is really going on? Lavalle is so genre-bending, I can see why some readers might find this frustrating. But he kept me engaged through all these twists and turns, and as the book progresses, it gets deeper and deeper into the realm of fairy tales: the unbowdlerized Grimm kind. In the end it delivered a payoff that horror fans will enjoy, although it probably seems over the top for non-horror fans. Overall it was masterfully done. Victor Lavalle keeps delivering genre-bending, mind-bending tales of deep humanity and eerie inhumanity.