Disappearance at Devil’s Rock by Paul Tremblay
My rating: 4/5 cats
after reading enough* books by an author, usually you learn to anticipate their beats, you have certain reasonable expectations and you know the general path they’re going to follow.
not so with paul tremblay.
he plays all sides of the tonal field, from the over-the-top-grotesquerie of Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye to the ambiguity and restraint of A Head Full of Ghosts.
this one is much closer to the slow-dread unfolding of A Head Full of Ghosts, and for 3/4 of it i really thought i was predicting his angles, seeing the threads and what they would become when all was eventually revealed, but i swear it’s like he felt me tracking him through his own narrative and just violently shook me off into a completely unexpected ending, leaving me baffled and spluttering “who wrote these words??”
it’s absolutely not the direction i saw this going.
and i can see how that reaction might read like a complaint or a criticism, but it isn’t, not exactly. i like having my expectations so emphatically destroyed, i do. i thought i’d figured out what was going on, using my close reading skills and my experience in worlds he’d previously built but it’s like he knew i was going there in my head and pushed me down with some violent I WRITE THIS WAY NOW maneuver that completely threw me. which is not to say that the ending doesn’t make sense. it does. it’s a case of “boy, i didn’t see that coming!” only in the opposite way that it usually means.
i don’t know how to explain it. i’m confused, but in a good way. up until the ending bits, i was very confident in where i was going and i thought it was a perfect follow-up to A Head Full of Ghosts: he has such an aptitude for atmosphere; the way he builds it and drags it out and does that straddle over the line that separates the supernatural from the psychological explanations, between magic and the mundane, between hope and fear and answers. and it’s really intense and creepy and utterly riveting, but it’s ultimately a completely different kind of story from A Head Full of Ghosts. again, not a bad thing, just … different. it’s like a pretty girl with a baboon heart – it’ll work fine, but you still have to acknowledge she’s full of monkey parts.
* three novels plus one co-authored novel, one short story collection, and one novella
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best week ever – in which i receive three books in the mail i really really want to read and maggie really really wants to sleep on.
best week ever part one:
however, there are zero characters named “karen brissette.” paul tremblay, this is what they call “backsliding.”
best week ever part two
best week ever part three
