Bedbugs by Ben H. Winters
My rating: 3/5 cats
OH GOD, A REVIEW FROM A SIMPLER PAST! having now lived through a bedbug invasion, i can tell you, there is no greater horror in this world or the next.
every book starts out as a four-star cat book for me. i am hopeful, but realistic. and then as i read, the book will either gain a star cat, or lose one (or more). this one maintained its four-star cat rating until the very end, when an epilogue i thought was a wishy-washy letdown ruined it for everyone. too brief, too neat, too facile, and it made every flaw of the book that i had let fly before that point more prominent in my mind. we call this bel canto syndrome.
before that ill-considered ending, this book was fun, but not life-changing. conveniently, this review now exists so i don’t have to muse too much here about my expectations for books to entertain or enlighten me, or both, and the way i approach different “kinds” of books and what books qua books can do for a reader.
because i just wanna talk about bedbugs.
if you are in one of the places without a little red spot on it:
you have probably never had a bedbug scare. i thought i had bedbugs once. thankfully, i did not, but i lived through the really bad bedbug epidemic here in new york a couple years back, where people were afraid to go to the movies, buy used clothes and books, go to the library, sit on the benches on subway platforms, look people in the eye…. i knew a few people who had infestations, and honestly, it is probably easier to just light your place on fire and start over than it is to get rid of bedbugs.
look at these little bastards
and their disgusting bites:
so, yeah, i did find a bedbug in my house one time. but only one, and i smooshed it like crazy, and nothing ever happened again. my point is, bedbugs make you crazy. they do. for months after i saw that little bastard, i was doing daily bedsheet inspections, checking my cat’s bedding, shaking out clothing, examining crevices between bed-and-wall, constantly imagining that i felt them crawling over my skin when i was drifting off.
so when i read a book about a women tormented by bedbugs that seem to only be targeting her, and who begins to go crazy because of them… well, i can relate, is all i’m saying. bedbug paranoia will make you crazy. and in susan’s case, when no one believes her and the exterminator finds no trace of them in her apartment, and her husband is distracted by work and financial stress, and she is self-medicating, losing sleep, and her doctor is suggesting she may instead have a case of the crazies, well, things can get out of hand pretty quickly.
to backtrack to plot a little, susan and alex are happily married, they have a tiny little daughter, and they figure it is time to move to a bigger place, even though susan has recently quit her job to focus on her painting, and alex’s business is going through a transitional period. they find a too-good-to-be-true cheap, huge apartment with a seemingly perfect studio-nook for susan, an eccentric landlady, and all seems well. once they move in, however, they start to notice some flaws they overlooked in their excitement. little things, but these little things will compound. the handyman warns them never to go in the basement, there is a mystery surrounding the previous tenants’ hasty departure,and strange things begin to occur. and escalate.
it is a fairly lightweight horror novel, but i have no problem with lightweight. it’s the same old story – young happy couple moves to a dream apartment, unease and suspicions lead to marital dissonance and emotional isolation… and then …bedbugs. ooooor aaaare theeeeyy?
susan is an unsympathetic character. very fussy and picky, a little high-strung with her little lists and her judgmental perfectionism and unemployed laziness. it is an oddly mixed bag of traits, and she’s not someone you are going to root for, at first.
of course, as she descends into madness she becomes more likeable, more sympathetic.
and i gotta say, and my reputation is known, but their kid, emma, is a really cute little-kid character.
it is great and fun until the end, sez me. i’m not sure how i would have preferred it to end, and honestly, it was really just the epilogue that cranked me out. it felt pat, tidy, distanced from the narrative, like the events preceding it had no real effects on the characters. and that just didn’t wash with me.
but as a fun distraction that will make you itchy for most of the book, it is effective and fun.
good enough, but not great.
however, those are some terrific endpapers:
