Sara the Librarian's Reviews > Episode Thirteen

I fucking love haunted house novels and I wanted very, very much to love this book. I was perhaps shooting myself in the foot a bit reading this so soon after losing my ever loving mind over Richard Matheson's Hell House which this book very closely models at least in terms of its set up.

Just like "Hell House" we've got a bunch of intrepid investigators arriving at an abandoned house that was previously the site of clandestine experiments in the paranormal in which lots of people disappeared and/or died. Just like "Hell House" some of them are scientists who scoff at things that go bump in the night and some of them are die hard believers in all things ghost related. Just like "Hell House" there's a lot of arguing between these two sets of people and just like "Hell House" all this pent up passion and anger seems to feed whatever is lurking in the walls and under the floorboards and before long these seekers of truth find way more than they bargained for.

Unfortunately unlike "Hell House" this group, the cast and tech crew of a ghost hunting show called "Fade to Black" (good name by the way) are about as interesting as the dust and mold that's all over the Paranormal Research Institute, the derelict mansion they're there to investigate for the 13th episode of the show.

The book is constructed from the journals and transcribed footage discovered in the aftermath of their attempts at uncovering the Institutes secrets. I very much like the idea of a haunted house epistolary novel and the emails and journal entries of the cast are the strongest parts. Unfortunately most of the narrative is a literal teleplay of the action with actual "stage direction" descriptions of whatever supernatural encounter is happening. As though some intern at the network was tasked with literally describing all the footage they've retrieved. This just destroys any kind of dramatic tension or horror you might get from actual exposition. Instead of slowly ramping up a tense encounter with lots of description of the haunted room everyone is in with strange noises or internal monologues we just get italicized comments like a twenty foot zombie woman then materializes out of the floor and everyone screams.

The characters are also very one note. If you're going to construct your story using the individual voices of your characters I really need to hear those voices and I just didn't. Beyond being told that Claire the scientist is determined to find the secrets of the Foundation and won't give up no matter what I don't have any sense of who she really is or what's driving that determination. I'm told that Kevin the retired cop is a know it all who thinks he should be in charge and he says lots of mansplainy things but I don't really know where any of that is coming from. Every journal entry sounds the same no matter who's talking.

I think the problem with stories like these is that they're ultimately too big to be told. Is there an after life? Are ghosts real? And if they are what even are they? Those are huge questions that are never going to have a satisfying answer in a literary context. The answers almost always going to be disappointing or dumb. Those concepts are just too theoretical. The second you say something like "oh the entire basis for ghosts is from this one thing I've just discovered" you're kind of just set up for failure.

But by the same token not even trying to answer the question or trying to do it with cheesy special effects or wildly overused tropes like "walking into the light" are just as disappointing. Ambiguous endings when you've just spent 400 pages on a quest to find out what ghosts really are just makes me want to throw your book in the garbage.

Cosmic horror works because it acknowledges this idea that there are things in this universe that are simply too huge, too monstrous for our puny human minds to comprehend. Stories set in those kinds of worlds work when we see the characters acknowledging that and still fight on to get to that truth they so desperately want even though they KNOW it will drive them mad. And that drive in turn infects the reader. We know the end will be terrible but, just like the explorers at the mountains of madness we seem to be powerless to stop pushing forward. The story becomes about that battle. The answer isn't so important anymore its the wild, horrifying journey getting to it that we care about.

That doesn't happen here. The supernatural encounters the team has are strangely dull and their reactions amount to little more than "wow that was cool! We just learned ghosts are real! neat!" so there's just nothing to get invested in.

I truly wish I could recommend this and I do admire the authors intent but this was an exhausting and ultimately deeply disappointing read.