Who's chasing who? That's what I wanted to know while I was reading this book for the third time (and ultimately it was me chasing sleep as I stayed awake into the wee hours because I couldn't put it down).
At first, it's unclear exactly what's going on in this book. A monster is killing people. A young boy is chasing the monster. Someone is chasing the young boy. There's a storm coming and it's going to swallow us all whole. What should we be afraid of, everything? It's everything, isn't it?
One of the main themes of the book becomes clear early on when the young boy says that he learned from an early age that appearing "normal" was the most important thing. The boy is an unknown cipher at first. Is he a monster? Since this is the second book in a trilogy, if we've read the first book, we know something about the young boys and their connection to the monsters. So perhaps this young boy is a monster. He certainly appears to be doing some monstrous things. As the book goes on, we hear language from his mouth that we're used to hearing from abusers. He seems to be holding a young woman against her will, she's tied up and her mouth is taped shut, and he says he has to do this to her because he loves her. This kind of language keeps us off balance, because it makes us wonder why the boy is doing these monstrous things if he isn't a monster.
I also recognize the language he speaks when he tells the young woman that he ties her up to keep her safe because everyone outside the doors is a monster. I heard similar things from my own mother, how I needed to be afraid because danger lurked behind every corner, men were monsters and they would hurt us if we let them catch us alone. Where some parents tell their kids that policemen are heroes and that they're here to help us, she went as far as to tell us that the police were the biggest thugs of all, and we needed to be afraid of them, so I grew up terrified of the people who could have protected me. I had a feeling I knew why the young man was saying the people in the town were monsters, I had an inkling of the method behind his madness, but it was still unnerving for me hearing him use this language that is so often used by abusers toward their victims. It made me feel dirty, like my skin was in danger of crawling off and running away at any moment, which was uncomfortable, to say the least.
Then the book introduces us more to the other characters, A man who most surely is a monster, though a much more human one than readers of these books are accustomed to, and a man who we met in the first book who is on the hunt for monsters, and a woman who is doing her best as a cop in a town that is dying in more ways than one, and we get caught up in these characters and their lives as they intersect. The man who hunts monsters and the woman cop start working together trying to stop a murderer, and that's when they uncover a web of abuse that's so sickening it stopped me in my tracks and gave me worse nightmares than momsters ever have, because these monsters were all too real.
Leo Tolstoy once said “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” and that quote stuck in my mind while I was reading this book. At one point the main characters see something we don't always get to see. The "outside facade" of an abusive family desperately trying to hide the abuse behind the appearance of happiness. We see what would appear to the untrained eye to be a "happy home," with all the supposed trappings of a happy family. This, of course, is all an illusion and as they go deeper into the home they see the reality, the darkness and dankness and evil.
Perhaps I should explain why this unnerved me so much. When I was growing up, my family had these periods where we were told we had to appear "normal." My mother pulled my brother and I out of school when I finished Kindergarten and he finished pre-first grade. She paid tuition at an accredited "homeschool" so she would have paperwork that said we were enrolled in school, so whenever someone came knocking asking why we didn't go to school she could get around it by saying that she taught us, but she didn't have the patience to actually teach us, so I had to teach myself to read and write, but whenever the police or social workers came to investigate our home, we were to appear happy and healthy and our mom admonished us to "behave" and be "normal,' and we saw it as our duty to play this role of the happy, well-adjusted child so these workers would go away and leave our family alone.
Now I realize how stupid this was, and how I should have been screaming as loundly as I could that things weren't notmal and I needed help now! And had I done that, maybe things would be very different now. But as a kid, I played the role because it was what I was told to do. So I'm well acquainted with the "normal happy home" on the outside that hides a dungeon of darkness and death underneath, but I don't think I've ever read a book that described it this well, so this book threw me for a loop when I first read it, and it took me awhile to get over that. Because even now, all these years later, I don't want to talk about the hidden darkness, I don't want anyone to see it, and I still feel like it's my role to help hide it so our family will be safe to keep practicing the secret things that happen in the darkness. But I'm learning that hiding the truth and stuffing it down for years doesn't make it go away, and some of the coping mechanisms we learn when we're trying to survive may keep us from dying but they don't really let us LIVE, and some of the trauma responses that happen right after big traumatic events can happen again even years after the trauma is over with if you stuff it down and try to hide it instead of dealing with it, and all of this can become very messy indeed.
Of course none of this is the book's fault, this poetic little horror tale about men and monsters. It just happened to trigger my trauma response because it hit so close to where my trauma lies, and my body recognized that even though I had buried it deep enough that my brain didn't even recognize it anymore. My body does this fun thing where when I'm triggered, I go into a dissociative fugue state where I can walk around and talk and even interact with people without a blessed clue what I'm doing, and when I finally come out of the fugue I'll have no memory of what I've done or said while I was in a fugue state, and last year while I was in one of these fugue states I broke into someone's apartment, sure that she was my friend Kylie from when I was eight years old, and I was going to rescue her from the man who was hurting her. This resulted in them calling the police and me being arrested and taken to jail, where I spent five and a half months rattling around trying to get the help I needed. I'm writing a book about this experience and I hope you all will read it and listen to me tell my story, but for now it's enough that you know that I wasn't just being a big baby wimp when I put off writing this review all this time, it was my fear of what writing the review might trigger that led me to avoid writing about this book, but I'm learning that you do the best you can with what you know, and then when you know better, you do better, and since hiding my trauma got me nowhere but in a huge mess of my own making, I'm going to try NOT hiding my trauma and see what happens. For now, I think the fact that this book was horrific enough that writing about it sent me into a dissociative fugue is a pretty big indicator of how good the book is (after all, isn't horror supposed to be horrifying?)
But discovering the horror hidden behind the happy family facade only takes less than half the runtime of the book, and there's so much more here. From a grasping attempt at a love story, to a discovery that monsters can wear many more faces than at first we may have thought, to a question of how one is supposed to live after discovering that the monsters are real, to the final confrontation of the family from hell, there's a lot contained within the pages of this book. And in the end, I must conclude (as a wise man once wrote) that sometimes when the horror is over and you're what's left, you just have to live and be grateful for the life you have. As that same wise man also once said, "Don't be afraid."
In Jesus's name, amen.
