Ian McEwan is apparently a very famous British author and this is his first book. Shows how much I know. I just grabbed it because I liked the cover art. It has a creepy haunted house of bygone transgressions feel to it and it says, “Macabre” on the cover. You got me marketing department, you got me.
I keep seeing this book labeled as horror. It’s in the quotes on the first page, it’s on the internet, etc. My fellow readers of pulpy fiction…it is not in any way a horror novel. What we have here is highfalutin literature.
It’s post WW2 England. We have a family in a neighborhood that has been mostly torn down to make a highway. The government changes their mind about building the highway which leaves the neighborhood a wasteland. Only a few houses are left and our family resides in one of them.
We’ve got dickhead dad, background mom, older hot sister, jerkin off son (appropriately named Jack), book reading daughter and possible future serial killer son. Ages oldest to youngest. While parents fight downstairs, kids are upstairs playing naked doctor.
Dad loves his garden in the back of the house and buys a bunch of cement to make a pathway through it. He makes Jack, our main character, help him mix and poor the cement. While doing this Jack gets THE URGE and heads upstairs to take care of business. As he is doing so, dad dies of a heart attack in the basement. I loved this part. It had me laughing with it’s fucked-upness.
No one is really bummed except the youngest son who is emotionally all over the place. After dad dies, mom takes over and she’s cool but she eventually gets sick and bed ridden and then dies also. The kids find her, decide not to tell anyone because they don’t want to be put into foster care. Mom has left them money and oldest sister has been taking care of the family lately anyway so the show goes on.
Unfortunately, mom is starting to stink so they drag her to the cellar, put her in a chest and fill it with cement.
The rest and bulk of the book is the kids relationship with each other and how they handle the situation. It’s a look at human emotions, how we deal with death and survival wading in a pool of incestual teenage horniness and self-centered nihilism. All Jack cares about his himself, his sex fantasies about older sister and that’s about it.
Whole lotta incest in this one. You are in Jack’s head and it’s a bummer. It reminded me a lot of the tell-all graphic novels of the 90’s like Peepshow by Joe Matt. Every embarrassing thought and action brought to life for our cringing, can’t-look-away enjoyment.
From this viewpoint the book was good. It was great actually. It sticks with you. From the viewpoint of wanting to read a story to escape from real life it is the opposite. This is the human experience and what I was looking for was the ghost experience.
Berkely 1980
Originally published in 1978.
Review by Nick Anderson
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