I feel that it’s necessary to stress two things at the outset of this:
1) This review will contain HEAVY SPOILERS. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the only real spoilers you can give for this book are the kind that would ruin any chance you had of reading and enjoying this book. So I’ll say just this: the book starts off normal, then becomes stranger and more mind bending at an exponential rate. If you want to read my theory on the story’s meaning, click here.
2) This will not be a light-hearted bashing of a book like the other two Tome Takedowns. I know I made this page with the idea to roast books that I personally hated, but this is not one of those. I don’t think it’s accurate to say that I “like” this book, but it’s a very good book and I think you should read it.
The review begins below this image.
This book is a slow burn in the truest sense. Almost the first half of the book takes place in a long car ride. We get flashbacks, sure, but it’s a lot of nothing happening. Conversation between two quirky people. Or one quirky person and a (mostly) carefree main character.
Normally, I would have dropped this book and gotten bored pretty quickly. But the thing about this book is that it pulls you along, just a little. It teases you with breadcrumbs of a mystery that almost seems like it doesn’t exist. Odd occurrences happen that are soon forgotten about or ignored by characters, yet I can’t stop thinking about it. The main character early on introduces this enigmatic but dangerous person named “The Caller”, and slowly gives more information about them, yet not enough to fully understand who they are. And in between chapters is a short dialogue between two people talking about a horrific event, getting more detailed about it every chapter. These things just kept me reading, wondering, thinking about the significance of everything.
I was honestly convinced that the whole book would take place in the car, but I was surprised when they made it to Jake’s parents’ farm. That was when it went from just a little odd, to very strange. I assumed the climax would happen here. You meet the crazy parents, there’s a dark secret basement, it had all the markings of horror cliches. But the real strange thing was after all the times where I thought things would go south, they didn’t. Nothing happened in that house.
By the time they make it to the school, I’m having serious doubts about this book. I know just as much about the story as I did when I started, despite all the information dumps the book gave. There’s so much said, but none of it answers any questions that you have. In fact, they just make more questions. I kept reading, not because I was enjoying it, but because I wanted an answer! I wanted answers! And I knew at some point that I’d get them, so I kept reading.
But inside the school is where things took another left turn. Another cliche horror scenario, but ONE question is answered (not explicitly, though): the dialogues in between chapters are talking about a murder that happened in the school. And this is enough to re-engage me at this point. I’m awaiting the climax where somebody dies and everything is explained.
I should have known that there weren’t going to be any horror cliches after the farmhouse chapters happened. Yet even if I did, I would have never imagined how insane things would get in this part of the book.
I’m sorry- mental detour here- it has quite literally only just now occurred to me that the main character doesn’t have a name. In hindsight this makes sense (and I’ll explain that later) but I truly did not think that was the case. It’s crazy that I could read this whole thing and think that her name was said a number of time throughout the book, and even crazier that it wasn’t strange that nobody said it. I’m just going to call her “Jessie” and continue on with what I was gonna say.
Jessie’s hair is falling out, her nails are falling out, she’s got nosebleeds, all seemingly from nothing. This girl starts falling apart right before your eyes and there’s no explanation as to why. At first it seems likes stress with a bit of hair falling out but then it just becomes baffling. At some point I did wonder to myself how long this sequence was going to last because if the janitor didn’t find her soon I was going to mentally check out. I put this book down on page 190 because I had to leave work, and that was quite possibly the best and worst page I could have left off on. Just one page into the next chapter, Jessie disassociates completely. “I” and “me” are completely replaced by “we” and “us”. Sometimes the we refers to just Jessie, sometimes for some reason it’s Jake, other times it’s neither of them. I continue to read as though it always means Jessie but I couldn’t quite be sure.
Still, nothing has ever made me physically reel back while reading a book until tonight, where I was met with four full pages that just had the same question:
What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for?
I can’t help but wonder what happened to Jessie. She’s here physically, but it feels like she’s not there anymore. Like another split personality took over to narrate her and Jake’s lives. At some point, the narration switches between Jessie and Jake with each new paragraph, yet always speaking in first person, which I found really cool especially since it wasn’t explicitly stated.
The story ends with a semi-graphic suicide by hanger. Jessie kills herself, willingly. And still reeling from the events the immediately preceded this, I’m left confused. It almost seems like Jessie and Jake are the same person, but that doesn’t actually make any sense.
THE ENDING
Everything comes together at these last two pages. The explanation, but not the explanation I was looking for. I don’t think anyone was looking for this explanation, which is probably why this book got so many poor reviews. Why you either love this book or hate it.
The final dialogue between the two people reveals what you might have suspected: there was no Jessie. There was no janitor. There was no brother. There was only ever Jake. And he killed himself in the janitor closet. But that’s only what the first page tells you. The second page is just so incredibly mind numbing.
The “note” Jake left behind is the book you just read (excluding the dialogues between chapters, of course). You just read somebody’s suicide note and you’re just finding out about it. That alone is chilling. But now you are left in the same position as the people in the dialogue: figuring out what it’s supposed to mean. Jake’s story is completely contained in this book. How he lived and why he died. I think someone might take this as an “it was all a dream” kind of ending, since a lot of events in the book technically never happened. But as Jake puts it:
“Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can’t fake a thought.”
These 200 pages are all Jake’s thoughts. We know what happened. We didn’t need Jake to tell us. The two anonymous voices told us everything that anyone else knows: Jake committed suicide in the janitor closet. But these 200 pages are the key to knowing what was going on. The answers I was waiting to be told were waiting to be found. No autopsy report or perspective from another person could tell me what Jake was thinking, and that’s exactly what we have here.
So in a way, this ending gave me a number of answers, I just had to reflect on what I’d known. Yet there’s still more that I want to know, more that’ll only be decipherable from reading the book again. I never thought a book could have more value on a second read, but here we are. I think this book is great. It’s disturbing and confusing and I don’t want to say that I like it but I want to devote so much time to uncovering it’s secrets.
Pepperfaced 