I’m going to give a spoiler alert for this review right up front and go on record to state that this novel is an easy contender favourite horror novel of the year (and yes, I’m quite aware that we’re only about one-sixth of the way through the year). I’ll take a guess that the only contenders to knock it from that perch may be the two new Philip Fracassi novels I haven’t gotten to yet.
Anyway, Episode Thirteen. Here’s the official summary…
Fade to Black is the newest hit ghost hunting reality TV show. Led by husband and wife team Matt and Claire Kirklin, it delivers weekly hauntings investigated by a dedicated team of ghost hunting experts. Episode Thirteen takes them to every ghost hunter’s holy grail: the Paranormal Research Foundation. This brooding, derelict mansion holds secrets and clues about bizarre experiments that took place there in the 1970s. It’s also famously haunted, and the team hopes their scientific techniques and high tech gear will prove it. But as the house begins to reveal itself to them, proof of an afterlife might not be everything Matt dreamed of. A story told in broken pieces, in tapes, journals, and correspondence, this is the story of Episode Thirteen—and how everything went terribly, horribly wrong.
Fantastic premise, right? But we all know that a fantastic premise doesn’t always mean the author can stick the landing. DiLouie? Hell yes, he sticks the landing.
I will say that, relatively early in the novel, the first big “event” (no spoilers) made me really question whether I wanted to go on. It’s trumpeted by the characters as “solid proof” and I was over here thinking, nope, that’s clown shoes, kids. There’s a bunch of very unsupernatural reasons that could have happened and it made me question how good the rest of this novel was actually going to be. I will go on record as thinking, whoa…lame!
When I got to the next event, that’s when I realized that DiLouie was messing with us, giving us a false sense of security before he whacked us over the head.
The rest of this book is just unbelievably fantastic. I’ve read a couple of reviews comparing it to a cross of Hell House and House of Leaves, with a little bit of Event Horizon tossed in. I’d add a taste of A Head Full of Ghosts into the mix. And that’s actually a really good set of comparisons.
It starts as a decent haunted house story, with the weirdness of the hippie scientists from 1972 (and captured really well, by the way, from the groovy language to the tagline for Tootsie Pops) but then slips into this far weirder and scarier thing. While I compare it to those other novels, I must point out that this is unlike any other novel I’ve ever read. This is one of those rare haunted house novels (along with the aforementioned Hell House, Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and of course, King’s The Shining) that both set up the promise, then actually deliver on it and do it well. I can’t think of any others that do it as well.
I know some are complaining about the epistolary format, but honestly, I actually quite enjoy that, so it worked really well for me. Individual results may vary.
This is the first DiLouie novel I’ve read, but it won’t be my last, if he can pump out brilliance like this.
