There’s a segment that dragged for me: A story within the story where Mona finds old redacted files about the staff of Coburn Obsevatory. Yeah, thank you for developing all these tiny walk-on roles just so we can see them get slaughtered. That bugs me, especially when you get to the Grand Guignol climactic act of people suiciding in droves in grossly violent ways. As is the case in many horror stories, they exist only to provide appropriate death counts later. There are a lot of characters here, and some seem to exist to pad out the population. Before this moment, Mona’s been stumbling bravely through the dark afterward, she is still confused but she’s on the right track. Once she gets Parson (one of the elder siblings) to spin her a “fairy tale” about a family - a very thinly veiled history of their kind - t hen the story kicks into high gear. It gets a little tiring to watch Mona spinning her wheels for the first third of the book. The reader beats her there, because we get to see scenes that she doesn’t. It takes a long time to get Mona mostly up to speed. Murdering one of the god-children is impossible for a human to do, and it’s unimaginable for one of the family to have acted in such a way.Īt first, the remaining elder members of the family want Mona to leave, sensing that her presence is disruptive, but when there’s a second murder, one of them recruits her to figure out what’s going on.Īmerican Elsewhere is a big thick book which makes room for some petty irritations. When Mona arrives in Wink, it’s during a funeral for one of the eldest members of the god-family who has been murdered. On top of all of that, there are fragments of the God-Mother’s body scattered around Wink, slowly changing the landscape. Some of the people in Wink are real humans, some are only wearing the appearance of human shape, and some are monsters banished to the outskirts for not being able to fit in. This results in Wink being very weird indeed: not only are there monsters aplenty, Wink is mired in the pop culture of cocktails and green lawns and his and her social roles that Mother thought was appropriate. Each of you should obey the next eldest while I am gone, and you should never harm one another or anything else besides.” Then she died. She dropped them all off in Wink, the manufactured town built around the observatory, gave them three inviolable rules: “Stay here, and wait for me. The spoilery gist of this book is that in the past, Coburn Observatory did some experiments with mirror lenses and something observed them right back - a god who was hunting for a world to rehome her enormously powerful and enormously large brood. It’s also got a compelling batch of cosmic fantasy - the kind of magic that might just be sufficiently advanced science. It’s full of oppression and despair and people trapped in the ruts they’ve made of their lives. I was so glad I did.Īmerican Elsewhere IS a horror story: it’s full of blood and gore and people being horrible to each other for the wrong reasons. So even with three books behind me that I didn’t appreciate as much as the writing deserved, I picked up American Elsewhere. The Troupe tipped closer to dark fantasy, centering on a song that built the world. If I’m going to read horror, I want it leavened with something more palatable. These stories are full of good people struggling and dying, or full of bad people being bad and dying in terrible ways. Too many stories where people go out of their way to be awful. There are too many horror stories that rely on man’s inhumanity to man and the cruel nature of the world. I just didn’t like the stories they wrapped around. I kept reading Bennett because he always provided a trifecta of great things: Complex characters. Also content warning for suicides and miscarriages.ĭiscussion: I have a lot to unpack up front not least, why did I keep reading works by an author who wrote books whose endings I didn’t like? And why did American Elsewhere work so well for me when his others didn’t? This is a book from 2013, so kind of fair game. And the closer Mona gets to her mother’s past, the more she understands that the people of Wink are very, very different … In that town, there are quiet streets lined with pretty houses, houses that conceal the strangest things.Īfter a couple years of hard traveling, ex-cop Mona Bright inherits her long-dead mother’s home. Under a pink moon, there is a perfect little town not found on any map: Wink, New Mexico. Then I read American Elsewhere and loved it. After that, I read The Troupe and almost liked it. I read The Company Man, and didn’t like it. Robert Jackson Bennett is one of my favorite writers, slipping onto my auto-buy list. Technically, this is a reread, but it’s a reread with purpose.
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