Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I swallowed it; devouring pages, choking on the sentences, gulping air in between carefully crafted words and phrases.
It was a difficult book. A fact that didn't escape my notice back when I first lifted it off the shelf. The bland description on the back cover hinted, oh so beguilingly, at unseen horrors within and yet the calm and serene cover seemed to promise restitution. Read me, it seemed to whisper, you may suffer in the process but all will be well in the end.
Seduced by the lovely prose and by the implied promise of happily ever after I picked it up and began to read.
There is no happily ever after. Just as life tends to provide questions rather than answers, so did this book. The horror within blossomed, dark and incomprehensible, made all the more poignantly personal by the child's name... Kate. Reading it was like walking along the precipice, knowing you're going to slip down into the yawning abyss but hoping you're wrong. And as the book unfolded you would admit to yourself that you aren't wrong.
I'd like to say that the book was ultimately uplifting, that it brought comfort and deliverance along with its exquisite pain, but that would be inventing my own ending.
As most good books do, this one left richly painted and complex characters suffering in the wake of the last page closing. What made it so solid and real is precisely why there could be no happy resolution, no neat tying up of loose ends, no promise of absolute answers.
Real life carries no promises of happy resolutions to our own personal versions of hell and this book was nothing less than real in all its terrifying and inexplicable monstrosity.
No comments:
Post a Comment