Holly hell. What did I read? This was fantastic! Not since House of Leaves * Mark Z. Danielewski and Holes By Louis Sachar have I been so enthralled by dead spaces, empty spaces and more scarily, negative spaces. And this book was not just tension and horror but it was funny too. I was laughing in spots and I can definitely tell that the main character was a web designer.

(Mark was not appropriately miserable. He was posting platitudes about life being full of possibility and moving bravely into the unknown. Dammit, I can’t believe I spent so much of my life on a man who would unironically post the line “Today is a gift, that’s why we call it the present.” And in Papyrus, too.

For those of you who don’t know, Papyrus is a font. A very lazy font.

It’s not just the main character who is funny or quirky or out of this world. Uncle Earl was too. It kinda made me want to actually meet these people and give them a hug or purchase a mug from the Museum of Curiosities.

Uncle Earl believes strongly in Jesus, Moses, the healing power of crystals, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, that aliens landed at Roswell but the government is suppressing it, secret histories, faith-healing, snake-handling, that there is an invention that will replace gasoline but the oil companies are suppressing it, chemtrails, demon-possession, the astonishing powers of Vicks VapoRub, and that there’s proof that aliens contacted the Mayans and the Aztecs and probably the Egyptians, but the scientists are suppressing it. He believes in Skunk Ape, Chupacabras, and he positively adores Mothman. He is not Catholic, but he believes in the miracle of Fatima, visions of Mary appearing on toast, and he is nearly positive that the end times are upon us, but seems to be okay with this, provided it does not interfere with museum hours.

So what’s the book about? It can’t be just about a woman going through a divorce and moving back “home” to live with her elderly uncle in Curio museum? Or can it? Is it an exploration of separation and moving on or a check on the importance of perspective. Like – how silly is a divorce in the great scheme of things and the Facebook posts of the ex when an inter-dimmensional hole has opened that leads into a sinister and deadly world where the willows hide monsters and move at night and invisible creatures are trying to break through the fabric of reality and re-arrange your bones in a hill and leave you a boneless mass of living tissue.

I LOVED THAT.

And I loved the going through a divorce story.

We were having a Friendly Divorce™. Probably some people really have those, but in our case it felt as if we were locked in a competition over who could be publically most gracious to the other. Ha ha, no, I’m not bitter, why would you think that, no, my teeth always lock like this when I smile, I don’t know what you’re talking about….

Also, the writing was exceptional. I know I shouldn’t start a sentence with Also but there’s always something else I remember liking about the book so I tend to include it as an afterthought and all of a sudden, it’s another down. I have read so, so many absolutely horrendous novels and novellas and not due to the content but to the writing. I hated American Pastoral due to its non-spaced writing. I had some issues with Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis too. But this book – yay for writing.

They [the leaves] rustled in the wind. A hissing rustle, layered and complex, the sound made by thousands of leaves moving against each other. The kind of thing that you’d describe as a susurration or murmuration if you felt like busting out the fifty-cent words.

Self-aware humour. I love that.

And to make things better: world building via video-game comparison

If you play video games, sometimes you’ll encounter a bug where you suddenly fall through the world. Something goes wonky and the landscape that is pretending to be solid suddenly isn’t. And you fall through and suddenly you see that the whole virtual world is just a skin a pixel deep, and you’re looking at it from the back, like a stage set viewed from behind. All the shapes are still there, all the rocks and mountains and trees, but inverted. You can stand inside things that looked solid just a minute ago and look up through trees that are suddenly chimneys.
I was getting the strangest feeling that the willows were somehow like that. If I dug one up, it wouldn’t have roots, it would just be attached to the sand, a thin willow-shaped skin made of the same stuff as the islands and the river. As if the willows and the river were… not artificial, exactly, but behind them was something vast and hollow.

Roll credits! What a way to set the creepy atmosphere that somehow doesn’t just stop with a dread feeling but goes deeper to unsettled.

So here’s my top 5 scary things:

• The schoolbus. I could see them moving under the green leather, distending it as they pushed forward against it. It molded to their faces and shoulders, drew tight around their fingers as they reached out through the leather. Were they trying to get out? I couldn’t tell.
• The moving leaves. One of the willow islands was across from and a little to the left of our bunker, and the wind was shaking the trees, sliding through the long silver leaves, branches moving back and forth, back and forth, while they hissed and whispered and snickered to each other. I did not like the sound.

• They. “What are They?” I asked. He shook his head. “This place. They live here. Don’t think too loudly. If you think about Them, it draws Them in….”
• The Boatman. The boatman lifted his head and shrieked. It wasn’t a human noise. It wasn’t a human face. His jaw opened wide, wide, far wider than any human’s could, and his lips pulled back from impossibly long gums, like a baboon screaming.

And last..

The Willows. The whispering, moving, somehow sentient Willows that could open portals between worlds.

Say that there were many worlds, but one ran behind them all, like an access corridor for the universe. The crawl space of eternity. If you knew how to do it, you could open a door in the skin of reality and step into it. A small place, without much going on. A few fish, a few otters, a killdeer calling. A quiet place. Maybe there had been more there once, maybe people, maybe a whole civilization. Maybe I just hadn’t seen very much of it. Maybe it was vast, though somehow I doubted it.

Me too. Awesome book though.