And check out my beautiful bookmark I'm using at the moment.
As usual from Josh Malerman, this is nothing like anything else he's written.
Emily and Jack are a young couple a few months into their relationship. After a sublime night out in a small town on the shores of Lake Michigan, Emily wakes up in strange bed, in a strange room, with a strange woman watching her through a picture frame. She is going to be the subject of this woman's art whether she wants to be or not.
The blurb calls this a Hitchcockian thriller and I cant think of a more appropriate description. This perfectly captures that atmosphere, with the steady build of tension on every new revelation. The multiple storylines revolving around each other, and the well placed shocks are a masterpiece of suspense writing.
Not only does this work brilliantly well as a tense thriller, it's also a meditation on the nature of art itself. What is art and why do we need it in our lives? How far can an artist go to produce the perfect work?
I think we can probably agree that the antagonist is taking things a sight too far.
If I was forced to pick any fault with this, one of the parallel storylines does seem to be noticeably longer than the other by the point at which they intersect, but that's a minor issue. I was hooked from the first chapter and fairly raced through this book.
I mentioned in my review of Watching Evil Dead that there were shades of Bradbury in his prose in that book. Those shades are here as well, fleshed out in more vivid colour. If Bradbury and Hitchcock got together to write a mystery thriller about art induced insanity, the result wouldn't be much different from this.
I can imagine that this book could be as divisive as Incidents Around The House. Josh is writing his own thing. If you buy into his vision you'll love it. And I personally buy into it 100%. If you don't like it, that's on you.
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