This book was very bizarre, and it got more so the deeper I delved into it. I was desperately trying to figure out what was going on with the dad for the first few chapters. Was he actually going crazy? Was he imagining things due to the trauma of an incident, or was he just genetically predisposed to have mental health issues that were now starting to manifest? Or, were the voices and images actually real?
I was leaning towards ghosts or a haunting of some kind, especially when things started going on with the son too. Once the little boy started to see weird things I thought that this would be the extent of the troubles with this family, but then things started going on with the mother as well. It turned out that she was why all this strangeness was happening but I still couldn’t figure out why, I couldn’t figure out her motive. Her point of view chapters are when things started to make a little bit sense, the mystery started to unravel with her monologues. She didn’t outright say what was going on until much later, but she gives you enough of a hint in those earlier chapters to begin to figure it out.
Besides the hearing of voices, seeing strange things, and mental instability, there is a lot of gross imagery to go along with this story. You’ll read through descriptions of creepy dolls and figures, bugs, slime and mold, squirming rodents, and bodily disfigurement. There is a lot of verbiage in this story that is so good at making you picture what is going on that you might curl your lip in disgust. The scare factor was good, but the disgusting factor was better.
Nonfiction and Nonsense 