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liber---monstrorum · 1 year

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2 ⭐ - sorry if the review sounds mean, I got infected with the nightmare vegan evil disease

SUMMARY

Grace isn’t exactly thrilled when her newly widowed mother, Jackie, asks to move in with her. They’ve never had a great relationship, and Grace likes her space—especially now that she’s stuck at home during a pandemic. Then again, she needs help with the mortgage after losing her job. And maybe it’ll be a chance for them to bond—or at least give each other a hand. But living with Mother isn’t for everyone. Good intentions turn bad soon after Jackie moves in. Old wounds fester; new ones open. Grace starts having nightmares about her disabled twin sister, who died when they were kids. And Jackie discovers that Grace secretly catfishes people online—a hobby Jackie thinks is unforgivable. When Jackie makes an earth-shattering accusation against her, Grace sees it as an act of revenge, and it sends her spiraling into a sleep-deprived madness. As the walls close in, the ghosts of Grace’s past collide with a new but familiar threat: Mom. (Source)

Review below the cut. Warning, this review will contain spoilers.

REVIEW

I'm going to be honest: there's not a lot in Mothered that I particularly enjoyed. The pacing, story, prose, and characters were not at all what I want from a horror book. There were exactly two characters I liked seeing on the page (which is stretching it, since one of them is a cat) and one horror moment that I found to be memorably creepy. While it was a fast read, if I hadn't gotten this book through Netgalley I almost certainly would have DNF'd it pretty quickly (and that is if I had picked it up at all, since it would have failed the page 99 test).

STRUCTURE AND PROSE

As it opens and ends the story, I may as well discuss the prologue and epilogue. These two follow a therapist named Silas, who claims he is excited to work with an unnamed patient due to the brutality of the murder she committed. It's obfuscated which of the two women, Jackie or Grace, committed homicide. (Keep a pin in this as we'll be returning to it.) As the prologue concludes, we are told that “[Silas’s] job, as it often was, would be to filter the drop of truth from a waterfall of magical thinking” (13). This setup, with Silas being directly indicated to be a character who would engage with the narrative about to be told, indicates that the main bulk of the narrative would be in a narrative frame. Grace would speak to Silas to confess her life story and convince him of her point of view (a la Frankenstein, the reason why I love a good frame narrative). This is not the case. Rather than being nested, the narrative is delivered by a close third person narrator, with Grace’s story bookended by Silas’s. The prologue and epilogue might as well have not been there; they add little to nothing to the narrative. All that was achieved was disappointment. The completely normal third person narration was. A Choice. Look, I’m a fan of close third person. It works fine, but it was a disappointing choice, espcecially after that prologue setup. Grace as a character does have interesting elements to her that I feel would have been far more interesting to me as a reader had we navigated the narrative directly through her eyes. Speaking of characters, wasted potential is the name of the game in Mothered. Characters have features and traits, but aren’t well-rounded. Part of that issue is with the dialogue; it is middling at best, and stilted, awkward, or shallow at worst. Additionally, there's not as much of it as one would think for a story about a toxic mother-daughter relationship stuck in close quarters.

The standout issue with the characters for me is that they are their role in the story before they are a character. Silas is not a character who is a therapist, he is the therapist character (and, upon a re-read of the prologue, is I think supposed to be some sort of reader stand-in? Which I also am not a fan of). Miguel isn’t a character who is the main character’s best friend; he is the best friend character (worse, he falls into the gay best friend trope). Jackie isn’t a character who is Grace’s mother; she is the mother character. Grace, by virtue of being the protagonist, somewhat escapes this issue, but still is not well-rounded or developed by any means. She’s supposed to be an unreliable narrator, something I normally love, but in her found to be unengaging.

Grace as a protagonist could have been interesting; she has a lot of childhood trauma, but does genuinely try to help those around her. She’s kind towards her friend Miguel and drops everything to help him when he gets sick. While has the bizarre hobby of catfishing women (which she calls damsels) online, she describes it as intentionally trying to help build these women’s self esteem and help them improve their lives. The interesting elements of her, however, aren't really fleshed out enough. The damsels plotline especially had a lot of very interesting potential that’s completely unfulfilled. It really only exists so that Grace has something to feel guilty about and hide from her mother. The pacing. God, the pacing. The pacing was strange, due to the fact that a bulk of the narrative is dream sequences. The narrative jumps forward in time rather suddenly in order to dump the reader into a dream without indication. Not only does this make the pacing feel jerky and inconcistant, it also means that the dream segments are also far less effective. While suddenly jumping from reality to a dream can be a valuable strategy because it puts both the reader and the character into a state of uncertain reality, most of the time it did not work in Mothered. The only time I did find it effective and memorable was the first; after that, since I knew what the author was trying to pull, the strategy was ineffective because I knew it was a dream, even if Grace did not.

The pacing during the non-dream segments was jerky as well. It often felt like the narrative was just trying to hurry to the next dream sequence. For example, chapter fourteen ends with Grace texting her best friend Miguel; chapter fifteen jumps to her having been hired by her old boss and visiting the new salon space. From that first paragraph, it's obvious that it's a dream. As a result, the non-horror section of the dream dragged on for far too long (since the conversation the characters was having was not only not real but also completely banal) while the horror section of it was not horrifying (as the physical danger, social rejection, and reality break Grace was experiencing was obviously just a dream). During most dream sections, especially during the second half of the book, I was bored. For a mystery/thriller novel, Mothered is not very mysterious or thrilling. While there is certainly a hidden past tragedy that is eventually revealed, the actual reveal is... kind of boring. The narrative takes, in my opinion, the most uninteresting route. In the prologue, Silas muses that the case is “a good puzzle… one that look[s] on the surface like the gory movies he still so loved” (13). But this isn’t a puzzle. All the answers are spoonfed to the reader, and if the narrative makes an attempt to hide it, it does a terrible job.

One example of a very unmysterious mystery is the intentional obfuscation of who killed who in the prologue. My thought process during the first half of the novel was this:

A) Because the narrative follows Grace in close third person and

B) never follows Jackie,

that would normally indicate to me that

C) Grace, as the POV character, will be the surviving party.

However, because the identity of the patient in the first chapter is intentionally and carefully obfuscated from the reader, then

A + B might not equal C, but instead equal either

D) an upset of expectations (for example, Jackie killing Grace)

E) a third act twist revealing a previously unknown actor or plot element that reveals that the killer, the victim, Grace, and Jackie are in a more complicated configuration than first presented.

As I continued reading, it became clear to me that the narrative was not going to pull anything that interested. Despite this, I held out hope that the final chapters would have some kind of twist. That hope was futile. That setup of not knowing who dies is never cashed out. It just follows the most basic, obvious route: Grace is the protagonist, and because she is a protagonist, she can’t die so she has to be the murderer. Why bother to intentionally hide who kills who and then just not do something interesting? Especially when that problem is directly presented as being a puzzle!

Speaking of basic, the prose in general was boring. It’s all very direct and blunt, which can sometimes be a fantastic way to write a horror/thriller, but it just didn’t work for me here. The prose relies so heavily on telling over showing I felt as though the narrative was spoonfeeding me. Look, I don’t always need purple-literary-Romantic-big-words-long-sentences prose to enjoy a novel, but I do need something to chew on. If I’m not finding that in the structure, characters, horror elements, or central mystery, then by god at least give me some chewy prose.

THE DREAMS

I love dreams in horror. Exploring unreality, watching the line between waking and dreaming blur, having one encroach into the other. I love it all. Therefore, believe me when I say that the premise of incorporating horrible nightmares into a horror story isn't the issue. The issue with Mothered’s dreams was the execution. First off: the horror elements were almost completely restricted to dreams. Although there were one or two moments of horror that I found genuinely intriguing, memorable, or creepy (for example, the "Mona needs a calfskin bag" dream), most of the rest of them were tropey, predictable, or overdone. While I bought that these dreams were upsetting for the character, they were not particularly upsetting to me. At some point it just got old. The use of dream horror is, to me, something that has to be done subtly, carefully, and sparingly, especially when we have a protagonist presented as unreliable. It's none of those things in Mothered. The few horrifying elements outside of dreams are hallucinations. Grace dismisses them as such pretty quickly, and the hallucinations themselves fail to be credible from the get-go because they aren’t believably slotted into Grace’s reality. Horror-wise they aren't even good ones; they're even more tropey than the dreams. Even the horror of Grace and Jackie’s toxic relationship and the childhood trauma was restricted to these dreams as well; while there were some good moments of toxicity, gaslighting, or emotional manipulation in the waking world (such as Jackie letting Coco outside), almost all the detail and nuance we get about their history is dreamed.

Even the dreamed details about their past that do carry over into the real world aren’t fully fleshed. For example, during a dream, we are introduced to the paper dolls that Hope and her sister Grace used to play with. Later, while rummaging through her mother’s things, Grace finds her sister’s doll but not her own. While the doll imagery comes back in later dreams, that doll as a symbol of her mother’s favoritism and her relationship with Grace never beomes a point of conflict between the two. There isn’t ever a conflict about it, even when those dolls get brought up in conversation. I wanted a blow-out fight about those dolls; I wanted those dolls as an element of gaslighting; I wanted those dolls to be something that lead to a direct conflict that further develops Grace and Jackie’s current day relationship. But they don’t, and neither does much else.

The book’s summary claims that moving in together makes “old wounds fester” and “new ones open.” Sure, old wounds get re-opened, but calling what happens “festering” is a bit of a stretch. Grace is reasonably stressed about her mother being a bad roommate at times and Jackie occasionally apologizes for being a bad mother to her (though those conversations are rather surface level and nowhere near as toxic as they could have been). The only “new wounds” that open are are the ones that kill Jackie, with nary a new psychological wound in sight. As a result, the level of intensity between the two never quite reaches the fever pitch needed to make that final snap believable, narratively satisfying, and sharp.

One final complaint about the dreams I couldn’t shoehorn in elsewhere, so I’m shoehorning it in here. Sometimes (typically during dreams where Grace is reliving a childhood memory), Grace calls Jackie “Mommy.” I get why—as a child, she certainly did not call her mother by her first name—but it really did not work for me. Grace was a child forced to grow up too soon; I could buy her calling Jackie mom, maybe, but mommy? I certainly can’t see an overworked, exhausted Jackie referring to herself as “mommy” to her children. It was just weird and off-putting and out of place because it was so infantile, and, to be honest, came off as funny and unserious.

All that said, the dream scenes were far better written than the scenes that took place in reality. If they'd had better connective tissue and were more subtly handled, they could have been very effective. As it is, they're disappointing.

REALITY

From the premise, title, and setup of Mothered, I expected a book about a toxic mother-daughter relationship. I expected the narrative to explore that relationship in-depth and push the tension of it to its very limits. I wanted to watch them try to navigate an enclosed space. I wanted overtures of forgiveness turning nasty. I wanted conversations about Grace's childhood! I wanted them to have small disagreements that balloon out of control! I wanted a slow build of tension and complex hatred! I wanted gaslighting, damn it! There were a few times—for example, the dinner party with Miguel—where there was subtle friction between actions and intention between Grace and her mother. Grace questions who her mother is now and how she relates to the woman who raised her. Jackie is the traditional boomer parent and brings up grandchildren. Miguel and Grace share the occasional bemused glance. It was a good early scene, which I thought would lead into later, complex, more dramatic scenes. For the most part, though, Grace and Jackie’s interactions were not all that complex, did not have subtextual implications, and were so direct and unnuanced it just was never all that interesting. While Grace certainly had reasons to doubt the reality around her, as a reader, I did not have any reason to believe what she was being told by her mother was untrue.

As mentioned earlier, most elements of the novel’s central mystery—what happened to Grace’s twin sister—were introduced in dreams, then (maybe) introdced into the waking world. The only piece evidence that emerged from a direct confrontation between Jackie and Grace was the box. While what it revealed wasn’t particularly funny, I couldn’t take the contents seriously because it just gave me Assassin’s Creed 2 flashbacks.

Anyway. On all accounts, even down to the title, Mothered is supposed to be about a toxic mother-daughter relationship. It's also about:

The pandemic (which didn't really work for me. If it had been a book set during the pandemic, it might have worked. The difference between the two is a bit difficult to explain, but it's something that made a huge difference)

Her career as a hairdresser

Growing up being the primary caretaker to a disabled sibling

A weird disease that causes nightmares and turns you vegan

An ace woman’s relationship with her sexuality and desire to be a mother herself (complete with guilt over telling a teenager to have an abortion so her life wasn’t ruined!)

The close friendship between two queer people

That same woman’s hobby catfishing other women, pretending to be a man so that she can help them improve their self-confidence

The book just tries to juggle too much in the 300-ish pages it has. While a novel of that length certainly can incorporate that many or even more plot points, Mothered just doesn’t pull off weaving them together as cleanly as it could have. As a result, the narrative becomes muddled and shallow, with the titular mother-daughter crowded out by the rest. Before I close out, I just want to complain about the whole mystery illness plot point. It's another unnecessary, underdeveloped plot element that muddies the narrative waters even further. The final hook it provides in the epilogue (the therapist is like "oh no I'm having nightmares... just like Grace did!!!") was so cheesy I actually laughed out loud. It became doubly funny when I realized one of the symptoms of the disease is becoming a vegan. I'm sorry, but I genuinely cannot take the narrative seriously enough to be thrilled or frightened.

FINAL THOUGHTS

In writing this review, I had the opportunity to sit with the novel’s themes and really consider: what are they saying? What do they mean? It’s interesting to me that initially I read this book as (at least attempting to be) feminist. Yet after ruminating on how the book handles themes such as abortion and birth, motherhood, disability, and childhood trauma, it surprised me how shallow and at times contradictory it all ended up being.

While I can see why other folks enjoyed this novel, it's absolutely not to my taste when it comes to horror, thriller, or adult fiction. Further, in my opinion, I think it's ineffective in its exploration of mother-daughter toxcicity and childhood trauma. I requested Mothered because I always heard such great things about Baby Teeth; unfortunately, I think this has indicated she's not an author for me. Thank you again to Thomas & Mercer for providing a digital advance review copy through Netgalley. If you're interested in reading Mothered, it releases March 1, 2023. Find more information about the book here.

#liber monstrorum reviews #mothered #mothered by zoje stage #horror book review #horror book #thriller book #thriller book review #book review #bookblr #netgalley #netgalley review

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liber---monstrorum · 1 year

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LIBER MONSTRORUM REVIEW: THE TREES GREW BECAUSE I BLED THERE: COLLECTED STORIES BY ERIC LAROCCA

3⭐ - Dear god, the metaphors...

Review under the cut.

(I was provided a digital review copy by the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for a review.)

SUMMARY

This collection contains eight short stories by horror writer Eric LaRocca (of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke fame).

In “You Follow Wherever They Go,” a young girl is encouraged by her ailing father to greet the group of children at the end of their driveway.

In “Bodies are for Burning,” a woman struggles with intense intrusive thoughts of burning the people around her.

“The Strange Thing We Become” follows forum posts whose writer chronicles their wife’s desire for a child and her cancer diagnosis.

The narrator of “The Trees Grew Because I Bled There” cuts pieces of herself off for her lover.

In “You’re Not Supposed to Be Here” two couples are forced to play a sick version of Truth or Dare where the only options are truth or rock.

A man on vacation with his daughter meets another man claiming to be psychic in “Where Flames Burned Emerald as Grass.”

The narrator of “I’ll Be Gone by Then” is tasked with caring for her ancient, ailing mother, but struggles with the responsibility.

“Please Leave or I’m Going to Hurt You” is about a man in love with his father.

REVIEW

I really wanted to like this collection. This was my first introduction to LaRocca, and while I had heard conflicting opinions in horror circles (you either love his work or really don't), I was pretty sure I'd fall into the camp of enjoying it. I usually like horror authors whose work is controversial and style bizarre. However, while LaRocca's collection voice in this collection was certainly strong, elements of it such as the use of metaphor and line pacing were obtrusive or distracting from the tension, character, and thematics that otherwise were so strong. The reason why I want to talk about voice in this collection is because the introduction, written by Chuck Wendig, waxes poetic about how strong LaRocca's voice is. Wendig claims that LaRocca's voice is so strong because he has empathy for his characters, because his stories revolve around queerness and sacrifice and transformation and viscera. "The dark magic at the core of this collection," Wendig says as the introduction comes to an end, is from a "sentence found in the titular tale of the collection: Anything that's worth doing always hurts." I do agree with Wendig on his analysis of LaRocca's work. If not for the strong thematics, his care in portraying his characters, and the visceral imagery LaRocca just knows how to present, I would have probably DNF'd this collection. Those are the only reasons why this collection hit three stars for me (and trust me, it hit it barely). The sticking point here is the prose. I don't like LaRocca's prose. I'm sorry, but it turned me off. Usually I love purple prose and indulgent descriptions, especially in short stories, especially when that prose is more blood red than purple. But I think my thoughts can best be summed up by a note I made while reading the short story "You're Not Supposed to Be Here": My god would it kill you to write a paragraph without a metaphor? Once I noticed how many metaphors LaRocca uses--and never short and sweet ones--I couldn't not notice and be annoyed. I counted over 110 metaphors; the book is 147 pages total, with 115 of those pages being the actual short stories. That's around a metaphor a page; in some sections, there would be multiple metaphors per page or in several sentences in a row. And, look, again, I love a good metaphor. I wouldn't even say any of the metaphors were necessarily bad. They were all evocative, all clear, but a lot of them were just a little too much. For example, in "The Strange Thing We Become," the scene with the Morse code machine (page 50 in my review copy) has seven metaphors and similes. Seven! At some point it's fluff. It's distracting. I don't need to know that "the machine chirped like a furious sparrow," just say that it chirped. The word chirped is doing enough lifting there! All those metaphors are exhausting. They're annoying. They're intrusive, and not in a good creepy horror way, in a "please just get to the point dear God" type way. Metaphors are great tools not only for their visual and thematic use but also because they change the pacing of a sentence or a scene. These metaphors, instead of heightening the tension or being used sparingly, really weigh moments down and kill the mood. If the prose was improved, this collection would easily be a four star read for me. His control of thematics, body horror, and toxic relationships is wonderful. Pain and misery and desperation ooze off the page. As it is, though, the metaphors crop up everywhere in the prose like the mycelium of an invasive species of fungus rendering the prose more difficult to read than something black and white and red all over and as strangely paced as a horse with five legs. (See, I can do it too!)

FINAL THOUGHTS

I think that if you like LaRocca, you’ll enjoy this collection. Other reviewers thought so, and I’m glad they enjoyed it. I wish I were them. Honestly, I think the issue is partially on my end; I tend to read with editor brain on, and editor brain notices things reader brain wouldn’t. Ah, well.

I have another book of LaRocca’s, You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood. I dearly hope that either those metaphors have been pruned over the years, his style has changed, or he writes novels with a different approach than his short stories. I want to love his work. Maybe next time.

If you’re interested in The Trees Grew Because I Bled There: Collected Stories, you can find more information here. The collection releases 7 March 2023 and is avaliable for preorder.

You can also find this review on my Substack and Storygraph.

Thanks for Reading!

#bookblr #book review #netgalley #eric larocca #the trees grew because i bled there #short story collection #short story review #horror book #horror collection #horror review #liber monstrorum reviews #horrorbookblr

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liber---monstrorum · 1 year

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A Review of Briardark by S.A. Harian.

SUMMARY

For Dr. Siena Dupont and her ambitious team, the Alpenglow glacier expedition is a career-defining opportunity. But thirty miles into the desolate Deadswitch Wilderness, they discover a missing hiker dangling from a tree, and their satellite phone fails to call out. Then the body vanishes without a trace. The disappearance isn’t the only chilling anomaly. Siena’s map no longer aligns with the trail. The glacier they were supposed to study has inexplicably melted. Strange foliage overruns the mountainside, and a tunnel within a tree hollow lures Siena to a hidden cabin, and a stranger with a sinister message… Holden Sharpe’s IT job offers little distraction from his wasted potential until he stumbles upon a decommissioned hard drive and an old audio file. Trapped on a mountain, Dr. Siena Dupont recounts an expedition in chaos and the bloody death of a colleague. Entranced by the mystery, Holden searches for answers to Siena’s fate. But he is unprepared for the truth that will draw him to the outskirts of Deadswitch Wilderness—a place teeming with unfathomable nightmares and impossibilities. (source)

Official content warnings: Gore, character death, terror, language, existential dread, mental illness, emotional abuse; more content warnings listed on Storygraph

REVIEW (disclaimer: I recieved a digital review copy of Briardark through Netgalley in exchange for a review.) Whatever I expected from Briardark, it wasn't this.

To tell the truth, I went in not knowing what to expect; the publishers introduce it as "perfect for fans of LOST and House of Leaves," two properties which I haven't yet touched (I know, I know, HoL is on my TBR this year). Based on my scant knowledge of these properties I assumed that meant people would be lost in a weird place.

In Briardark, people sure are lost in a weird place, but it gets so much wilder and bizarre than I could have ever dreamed of. Typically when a book is shilled as a horror thriller, it's just a horror book with a bit of thriller or a thriller book lumped into the horror category because it's a thriller. This, however, is a true horror thriller; the twists in this book are insane, and this is from someone who usually sees "twists" coming from a million miles away. Every single one not only ramps up the tension but also does something clever to tweak an aspect of reality we thought we could trust. Harian is also very patient when it comes to the reveal. Nothing's ever rushed, and the payoff for elements introduced or revealed can take chapters, if not hundreds of pages.

It's a quick read, too, despite its length (350+ pages, 10+ hour audiobook!). The pacing is excellent, knowing when to slow and take in the view and when to hurtle forward over the edge. Several times while reading, I would go to update my reading progress and realize that I'd only read five pages, but with all that had happened I'd expected 20+. In Briardark, stuff just keeps happening and doesn't stop.

THE PEOPLE While the blurb implies that there will only be two POVs, Briardark actually gives every character in Seina's team a POV. Siena and Holden are the main characters, yes, and most of the narrative is told from their perspective, but the narrative also isn't afraid to shift over to another character when necessary--usually when folks split up (or get split up). The reader isn't being shuffled around character's heads willy-nilly.

Normally I'm not a fan of multiple POVs; for me, more than two POV characters is pushing it. Briardark, however, does a really excellent job of handling multiple POVs. It establishes the characters firmly from Siena's POV first, allowing readers to become familiar with who they are before swapping. Also (and this important), every character is both unique and enjoyable.

Out of all the cast, Cam is my favorite. She's a well written lesbian character, something I always appreciate and rarely see. She's allowed to have a close, meaningful relationship with Siena, a straight woman, without ever being attracted to her. Siena never even considers the possibility. Cam's capable, respected in her field and her colleagues, and the trauma she has from her involvement with Briardark in the past is handled really well. I know these things can seem low bar to hurdle, but I'm starved for good lesbian rep, especially in horror/thriller books. I really hope to see more from her in the second book--her plotline was, to me, one of the ones I'm most invested in.

THE PLACE The establishment of place is beautifully done. The book is set in an absolutely awe-inspiring wilderness. Despite the fact I would definitely die immediately (and not even due to anything eldritch, just from the hiking), I'd love to visit.

One of the best pieces of advice I got from my writing classes was to treat place as another character. It's just as important as the human characters in a story, if not more so; the Deadswitch Wild, Briardark, even individual rooms all have their own character. This, of course, goes double for when the wild starts to get weird and eldritch (in more ways than one).

Honestly, I'm usually not one to be pro-map in books. I think they're fine, but I usually don't use them. I think that Briardark would benefit greatly from having a map included; maybe not necessarily in the beginning, but several maps are mentioned over the course of the book, and I was just dying for them to be included as an illustration or in the back. I read an advanced digital reader's copy through Netgalley, so they may be included in the final product. If not, I really hope the second book comes with a map or gets map illustrations. The textual description of them was well-done, of course, making them not strictly necessary, but they'd be cool.

That said, a lot of what is set up in this first book lore-wise recieves no payoff. It's the first book in a series (thank God), so having to wait for reveals is to be expected, but it's going to be hard to wait. Luckily, the second book, Waywarden, comes out in 2024. I can't wait to return to the Briardark in a year.

FINAL THOUGHTS I can't say if the comparison to LOST or House of Leaves is accurate. What I can say is that if you enjoyed titles like The Dark Between the Trees or short stories like "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" and "A Psychological Shipwreck" you'll love Briardark even more. It's weird, tense, and has some fantastic characters I can't wait to read more about.

Briardark released 16 January 2023. If you're interested in the book, check out the official website (https://briardark.com/), request the book from your local library, or buy yourself a copy!

#briardark #sa harian #bookblr #book review #netgalley #netgalley review #liber monstrorum reviews #horror book #book rec #horror book rec #horror fiction #thriller fiction

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liber---monstrorum · 1 year

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LIBER MONSTRORUM REVIEWS: "THE GHOST THAT ATE US" BY DANIEL KRAUS

The Ghost That Ate Us (photo by the reviewer)

Summary

Burger City is every unhealthy American burger joint rolled into one. It has eit all: beef, more beef, French fries, milkshake-adjacent slush, and a ghost. After a brutal murder occurs in the little restaurant off a highway in Iowa, strange things start happening. Objects move by themselves, machinery breaks down, and disembodied voices speak through the drive through headset. Younger members of the staff—struggling with their everyday lives—become obsessed with gathering evidence that the ghost exists. The situation grows quickly out of control, leading to the tragic murder of six employees.

Disclaimer!

Spoilers may be included in this review, as it includes quotes and discussions of some plot points. For the most part, the plot points and characters discussed are minor spoilers or are elements included either in the summary or the preface to the book. The discussion of the ending of the book will include major spoilers for the ending and plot, however.

Review

The Ghost That Ate Us is a mockumentary-style novel, utilizing several genre markers of true crime not only to criticize the genre itself but also to blur the lines between the novel’s fiction and our reality. The footnotes mix non-fictional sources (such as death rates in Iowa, quotes from political figures, and information about methamphetamine abuse) with fictional sources (such as court transcripts, academic articles about the murder, and news coverage). Daniel Kraus also uses a strategy employed by some true crime authors wherein their own experience of researching and writing the story become part of the narrative (think books like The Monster of Florence and I'll Be Gone in the Dark). Of course, in Kraus’ case, it is a fictional version of himself (who is nevertheless fairly close to his real self as far as I can tell in terms of career). These two elements do an excellent job of not only making the narrative believably true crime but also are wonderful world-building, with non-fiction sources creating a solid basis in the real world for fiction to build upon.

Just as any non-fiction true crime book, The Ghost That Ate Us contains several photographs intended to be of people, places, objects, and events related to the Burger City tragedy. Of all the mockumentary elements, this is the weakest, with many photographs being unbelievable. Some—such as photographs of the interviewed survivors—look like stock portraits, not the kind of natural photograph that would be included in non-fiction. Other photograps do not match up with character descriptions in text. For example, Clemens is described as having “curly black hair [which] has expanded into a bramble undelineated [sic] from his knotty, chest-long beard” (66). The picture supposed to be his on the following page throws him into shadow, making most of him difficult to make out save for his beard which is certainly not “chest-long”.

Other photographs just look plain unprofessional, such as the Trucker’s New Testament Bible and The Poltergeist by William Roll. Both contain the photographer’s hand partially in frame, making it look like they were taken without the kind of thought and care I would expect from someone meticulous in all other elements of writing. They don’t just look unprofessional—they look completely careless and out of place in something masquerading as non-fiction. For the Roll book, the photographer hasn’t even removed the Thriftbooks sticker (one of my favorite places to buy books, but I digress) from the spine. I’m half sure that the New Testament Bible photo is photoshopped. What makes it worse is that there are decent photographs of books (centered, clear picture without hands in frame), such as the IDEAS book on page 223. Even small elements—looking too professional, like the stock photos, or too unprofessional, like the book photos—break immersion.

That said, the issues I have with the photographs are relatively minor. It’s immersion breaking, yes, but not the end of the world. I can flip the page and forget about them. What I cannot just flip the page on, however, are the treatment of the characters of color and the final section.

As I discuss my issues with the writing for characters of color, keep in mind that I am a white reviewer. Don’t take my thoughts as the end-all be-all to these characters. This is just what I noticed while reading and my opinion, so please do feel free to disagree or point out if I’m incorrect or missing anything.

The characterization of Tamra Longmoor strikes me as having major issues. Her introduction on page 28 is “First is today’s shift manager, Tamra Longmoor, the restaurant’s only Black employee. Her Burger City uniform is a size small so as to detail her muscles.” She is “the one Burger City employee you didn’t fuck with, didn’t even joke with. She had no detectable sense of humor, and if you pushed her an inch further than she liked, she turned on you with the wrath of God, spitting chapter and verse” (159). She’s “the best shift manager on payroll” who “always gave the 180% Nutting asked for” (159). In other words, she’s a strong (in physicality and personality) Black woman, who is fanatically Christian and completely humorless. My time in book and writing spaces online has exposed me to a lot of criticism and discussion around portrayals of black women in fiction, so when I saw this it struck me as clearly racially insensitive and drawing on harmful tropes. She is a minor character, meaning she rarely makes an appearance in the narrative, but the times she does mostly center around these very shallow elements, never developing her beyond this trope. While other characters certainly also draw on tropes (such as Amy Mold, whose trope is the angry feminist), the difference is that their characters are fleshed out. They are given more detail and nuance. Tamra Longmoor never becomes anything more than a strong, religious, serious Black woman, and then she (probably) dies offscreen trying to rescue a white girl. I really do think that this book would have been vastly improved with a sensitivity reader so that this could have been caught and improved before publication.

That brings me to my second major issue with The Ghost That Ate Us: the ending. Spoilers ahead, friends, so be aware.

The final section of the book is framed as a hurried, last-minute addendum, containing additional research done into the perpetrator of the murder which set everything off, Scotty Flossen, and a final visit to Kit Bryant.

I hate it.

The final section leaves no questions, no room for interpretation or uncertainty. It shoves the solution down your throat in an awkward, heavy-handed way that completely breaks all immersion. It felt like Kraus didn’t have faith that his readers are smart enough to pick up what he is putting down. Instead of letting us conclude that yes, Kit was indeed possessed by the ghost, he not only outright stated in this final section that Kit was possessed by the ghost but traced exactly what caused the haunting and how it happened (a cult Flossen was evidently a part of). I already despise it when horror books dump the answers in the reader’s laps at the last second, but I especially despised the final scene with Kit.

I will not lie: the final scene is gross. It’s greasy and nasty and full of bodily fluids. I can only compare it to Junji Ito’s Glyceride. The nastiness of it is not what I disliked about it. What I disliked about it is the ways in which it caps the book’s handling of body weight. All of the survivors are thin. Not fit, not healthy, but very thin. Their weight loss is described at length as a strategy to get the readers to empathize with them. Meanwhile, Kit’s weight and weight gain is used as a strategy for the readers to dislike him. In the final scene, Kraus visits a now bedbound Kit and is disgusted by how unclean, greasy, and fat Kit is. The way his flesh moves and how absolutely disgusting he finds it is described in excruciating detail.

I don’t think Kraus was trying to do this, but it’s another example of him using an insensitive, overplayed trope. In character design, often fat = evil, bad, and ugly and thin = good. Yes, there are reasons for Kit’s weight gain and the victim’s weight loss. Yes, those reasons make sense with the plot and thematic goals. Regardless, it still fits into that trope. Without this final scene, it wouldn’t be so bad, since previous discussions of weight were nowhere near this level. With this final scene, the book’s handling of weight becomes a more glaring problem. I don’t think it’s possible—or feasible—for authors to catch every mistake or know every nuance, issue, and harmful element of every trope under the sun, even for tropes they use. However, it is something that impacted my enjoyment of the novel, and something that I think as both a reader and a writer is something that authors should take more seriously. Sensitivity readers or a similar service that could have suggested revisions would have gone a long way towards vastly improving the use of tropes in The Ghost That Ate Us.

I genuinely believe that The Ghost That Ate Us would have been much improved without the final section. The book’s main themes revolve around consumption. Consumption of food, consumption of mind, the effects of being consumed by hopelessness, by helplessness, by fear. How systems under capitalism consume minimum wage workers and those in poverty. Capping all of that off with “oops, no it really was a ghost all along, and now that ghost has infected me, oh no, you gotta destroy the book before it gets you too!1!1!!” (yes, Kraus does beg the reader to actually burn the book) weakens those themes. There is no subtlety in its execution, no grounding or connection to reality that makes the rest of the book effective. This final section takes the fault of the tragedy and places it more firmly in the supernatural court, dramatically weakening the criticisms of capitalism, fast food, and true crime.

Final Thoughts

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Liber Monstrorum: A Review of "The Ghost That Ate Us" by Daniel Kraus

A well-written mockumentary horror marred by a terrible ending and some unsavory tropes.

Kay PoppleSep 3

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The Ghost That Ate Us (photo by the reviewer)

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Summary

Review

That brings me to my second major issue with The Ghost That Ate Us: the ending. Spoilers ahead, friends, so be aware.

I hate it.

Final Thoughts

I enjoyed almost everything before the final section. The Ghost That Ate Us was interesting to read and the occasional pieces of humor both provided well-placed moments of levity and were actually funny. Most of the characters—including Kit, Amber, Amy, Quin, Clem, Cheri, and Nutting—were interesting, well-written, and believably flawed. As someone who reads true crime but has major issues with the genre, the criticisms were spot-on. The prose was good. The world building, as I said before, blended non-fiction and fiction to fantastic effect. The pacing was very well done, with information being fed to the reader at a steady, balanced pace. The moments of horror (the Meat Grief description, the final moments before the murder, the Biting Room) were unsettling.

I wish I could give it a better rating, but the ham-fisted ending means it’s a three star read for me at best. It’s not a title I would actively recommend, but if you think it sounds interesting or mockumentary horror is a niche you enjoy, it may be for you.

This review originally appeared 03 September 2022 on Substack.

#liber monstrorum posts #liber monstrorum reviews #book review #bookblr #the ghost that ate us #horror book #horror book review

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