You know how sometimes, you’re following a recipe, but you decide to change it up a bit, add a little extra here, or leave out something there and, when you sit down to enjoy it, it blows your mind?
Yeah, this ain’t that book.
You know how, sometimes, you’re following a recipe, but you decide to change it up a bit, add a little extra here, or leave out something there and, when you sit down to enjoy it, you take that first disappointing bite and then spend the rest of the dismal meal trying to understand what went wrong?
Yeah, this is that book.
Roberts hooks himself up with some decent—if all-too familiar—tropes. We’ve all seen it before, this story’s as old as the hills…or Hill House. Then he folds in the tropes we’ve seen from The Exorcist. How do I know? Well, his main characters are named Hill, and the previous owner was named Blatty. So, the author’s wearing his influences on his sleeve.
As you’ve guessed by now, this book didn’t work for me at all. But the big question is why, right?
Well, near as I can figure, it’s a combination of a few things.
First, the characters. Dan Hill (no, not the “Sometimes When We Touch” guy from the 70s) is not all that captivating. He’s a generic dad-joke telling father who isn’t that great in his chosen field of psychiatry (though we’re told he’s pretty good, the evidence says otherwise). His wife Nora is a teacher with a bit of a secret that, while it should be a bombshell, seems both quite unlike her and also not that much of a bomb…more of a firecracker at best. There’s other problematically dull characters, but these are the two we get the most of.
Then, there’s the actual story. Stuff happens, but it seems to have very little impact. Some spoilers here, so, be warned, but I’ll give you a non-spoilery one first.
There’s a point where ol’ Daniel is so obsessed with the house he’s caught flat-out not listening to one of his patients in therapy. And the patient laughs it off. Dan decides to cancel the balance of his appointments for the day, including the next patient, already waiting. It’s made clear that she really kind of needs this appointment, but Dan blows her off and tells her to reschedule.
Okay! So, this lack of focus means she’s going to backslide and hurt herself, right? Or worse, right? Because of this horrific Exorcist’s House, right?
Wrong. The patient is never brought up again. No guilt. No dread. No consequences. It’s all the missed opportunities like this that just derail this novel.
Okay, on to the real spoilers: (highlight with mouse to read)
Dan has a horrific experience fairly early on in the book…which should have been placed later and milked for all the dread it was worth. Same with Nora and Luke’s experience. But, both experiences are conveniently forgotten almost immediately. Dan also experiences massive losses of time. And the impact? Oh well, no big deal.
And, while we’re on the topic of low impact, this all builds to the very predictable and very expected possession of Dan and Nora’s daughter Alice. Okay, expected, but hey, if it’s done well, then have at it, right? I mean, half the fun of the original Exorcist book and movie was that we knew Regan was possessed. But, all that build-up to an exorcism that took maybe ten-ish minutes? Really?
And the priest went on about how this evil being was going to dig around in Dan’s head and pull out all his secrets and insecurities and use them against him. I mean, sure, that’s Demonology 101, right?
Didn’t happen.
Come on, man! Make them work for it a bit. Again, no palpable threat when it can be defeated in ten minutes with a couple of ghosts and a dog.
And my last spoiler…does anyone actually die here? Because these guys are worse than Tolkien’s eagles for swooping in and saving the day.
Okay, enough spoilers.
Okay, so bland characters, no real stakes…anything else?
Unfortunately, yes. This was overly predictable. A name is mentioned, and you know damned well they’ll be called on for the big finale. A fifteen-year-old daughter—who apparently is incredibly opposed to moving, but is spoiled enough to be bought off with a Walkman and the promise of a new car for her birthday—is introduced and then you know what the big finale will consist of. An unborn baby is introduced and…well, take a guess. Yeah, you got it in one. The only surprises here—the return of certain characters—were not great ones.
And finally, the last thing was the stylistic choices. There’s an awful lot of tell in this book…pages of it, in fact, that could have been shown instead to add to characterization, or raise the bar on those dramatically low stakes. Things happen either off-stage, or from another person’s point of view that utterly robs them of impact whatsoever. In fact, in one case, an entire sequence is clumsily remembered right at the end—probably for dramatic effect—and it felt tacked on.
I know there’s a number of glowing reviews out there for this book and, hey, good on ya if you dug this book. Seriously.
But for me, the Hill House/Exorcist/Omen tropes that made up the recipe for this book? It felt like the chef took the basic ingredients, boiled them within an inch of their lives, left out all the spice, and served up a watery, banal dish of overcooked slop.
I need more. Horror, to me, is about dread. It’s about emotion. So, dammit, if you’re looking to scare me and you’re cooking with a well-used cookbook, you better make me feel something for the characters, you better take all those ingredients and mix them up in a way I haven’t experience before…or use them in the same way, but work out some really spectacular—and shockingly different—results. Don’t rely on easy “oh, I didn’t mention it” or “oops, I forgot” stuff. Give me real people that fall into insane, horrifying situations, and then make it a bitch for them to get back out again…if they even do.
You do that, you’ve got me.
This one did literally nothing for me.
And now I feel like I’ve got indigestion.
