It's spooky season, and that calls for spooky reads. My most recent is a new release from a popular, but new-to-me author: Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay.
In short: yes, I would recommend it for horror fans. It's brief, punchy, and manipulates the timeline to best effect to keep you curious and engaged and turning the pages. It also manages to build dread toward a certain turning point, and then completely subvert expectations when the promised scene finally arrives.
But it's also very meta - as in too meta. The narrator's self-awareness borders on navel-gazing, and, while I believe this to be deliberate, that we are supposed to empathize, but not sympathize nor like him, I had my Jeff Winger moments while reading.
I look at horror through two broad lenses. The horror is either the culmination of a character's actions and choices, or the horror is something external, an event or an affliction that happens to the character, and then drives the narrative from a reactive point of view. For an example: remember that old movie The Blob with Steve McQueen? The blob that falls to earth in a meteor is an external horror that preys upon the film's victims. Compare that to The Fly, where the horror is the direct result of ambition, hubris, and human error.
All horror is most effective when it preys not just upon our instinctual, automatic fears of our environment, of oddities and the uncanny, but our fears of ourselves as well. Our insecurities, and jealousies, and personal failings. Short tempers, and prejudices, and past traumas. That's why I've never cared for slasher films: the horror is entirely external; terrifying, yes, but the internal horrors have to be manufactured by a false sense of security, or lapses in judgement: teenagers having sex in a car, turning down the wrong road, failing to look behind them. It's a senseless sort of violence - which of course is naturally occurring in real life, but which, in fiction, fails to provide satisfaction or something upon which to ruminate.
Horror Movie is a story within a story: a script for a film within the story of the film's making, and the transformation from boy to monster unfolds in both narratives. It's a transformation that is wonderfully effective. It's a clever book, though it perhaps revels in this too much; in places, it's anything but subtle.
The plot runs along two concurrent timelines, past and present. In the past, our narrator is a young, broke graduate in need of a job, approached by a college friend and her creative partner about a mostly-silent role in the indie horror movie they're filming. In the present, uploaded clips from the original, never-released movie go viral online, and a Hollywood reboot is in the making, set to use the narrator, in a few scenes, as his original "Thin Kid" character. The original script tells the tale of a group of four high school friends, one of whom is the Thin Kid. At the film's opening, his three friends lead him through the woods to an abandoned school building, where they take him to an empty classroom, put a mask on him, and force him to stay put. Over time, through rituals of bullying, dehumanizing, and even a little blood magic, the Thin Kid becomes an actual, physical monster, and seeks his revenge.
It's a direct, and easily translatable metaphor, but the script includes the twist I mentioned earlier. The narrator recalls a particular scene that he describes as "wild," and context clues leave the reader with the assumption that it's a scene of wild violence. Monster carnage. I won't spoil it, but it instead is the cleverest scene in the whole novel. It breaks the fourth wall in a way that really works, and leaves us reflecting on all the ways in which we consume horror; to such a degree that it left me squirming and delighted at the same time.
The main character's present-day voice is the narration of an audiobook, a conceit that seems absurd at the end of the novel, and leaves me asking - again, effectively - is this supposed to be an actual audiobook? Was it narrated from a prison cell? Or merely in our narrator's head? Does the final transformation take place in a real, physical sense? Or is it more masking? In that sense, the one-two punch of a revolting scene alongside an ambiguous outcome at the novel's end checks every horror box. It elevates the novel from a sequence of uncomfortable and unsettling events to an outright scare.
While I liked the book, I can't say I liked any of the characters - and that's okay. In fact, I'd argue that's beside the point when it comes to horror. Sometimes you come across a horror novel in which you fall in love with the characters, but horror's main objective is to establish a sense of intimacy; to help you know the players in the novel, whether or not you like them or loathe them. And the thing about expertly-fleshed out characters we loathe...we usually find at least some kernel of our own truth within their stories. Be it a passing thought, or an action, or a reaction, every character in a horror novel offers us glimmers of the things we don't like about ourselves. That, then, is the most horrifying part of all.
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