I've had mixed results from Josh Malerman, even though I still haven't read the book for which he's best known, which is 'Bird Box'. I loved 'Unbury Carol' and enjoyed 'Inspection' but was left underwhelmed by 'Goblin'. This is somewhere in between, because it felt like a lesser novel while reading, only to seem much more substantial after the fact. Where I ended up was that it's a surprisingly important book that would scare my granddaughter a lot more than me.

Partly that's because it's a YA novel with a predominantly female cast. Kit Lamb is a high school basketball player in her last year before college and she scores the winning basket in the final seconds of the summer league final in the first chapter. The slasher movie this becomes has the killer murder a path through her teammates before reaching her.

Now, if that doesn't sound like your sort of horror novel, do take heed, because it's about two things more than anything else and one of them is basketball. Malerman is obviously a big basketball fan and there are things he takes for granted here that might confuse us a little. For instance, nobody has a handle quite like Tammy Jones, which I presume has to be some sort of basketball terminology because that's hardly an outrageous name, and I couldn't quite grasp seventeen-year-old girls calling themselves ballers. Is that a thing?

If half of this is about basketball, then the other half is about anxiety. Kit has anxiety and she talks about it a lot to her diary, which matters here because this book shifts between Kit's life under threat of Daphne, and Kit talking about her life under threat of Daphne in her Jolly Journal. Given that Daphne is urban legend as earworm, meaning that she's an eminent threat only if you think about her, having anxiety is a real killer and it's here the book demonstrates its value.

Malerman has clearly dealt with serious anxiety in his time, because this rings very true, even before we read his afterword. Some scenes resonated with me as particularly tough and, in their way, utterly horrific. Never mind the seven-foot-tall slasher, how about being worried about being worried more than actually being worried about a thing? How about fearing that the big moment that you've lived so many times in your dreams has actually happened and it wasn't that great, that it was over so quickly that you didn't even get to enjoy it, that everything will be downhill from here.

If that sounds like overthinking, then you're right. Most of this novel is overthinking and I must say that, if there's a worse enemy to have than your own mind, I don't know what it might be. There are those who will read this and freak out over Daphne because she's an apparently supernatural entity in the form of a female basketball player, therefore able to loom imposingly the way only someone seven-feet-tall can loom. Then there are those who won't care about a slasher, whatever form it might take, but who will be completely levelled by equating that slasher with a commonplace mental illness.

There's a line in Kit's diary late in the book that resonated with me and I'm sure will with a large number of readers. It's part of a note that Kit's leaving there for her parents, in case she doesn't make it out alive: "Make sure they understand the things we're told not to talk about are the things that get real bad."  She's talking here about Daphne, who is a subject the entire town of Samhattan doesn't talk about and so keeps coming back. She is also talking about anxiety, about mental illness, about things that affect our wellbeing that carry some sort of social stigma.

And, of course, there are so many other ways to see that, in other contexts: abuse, illness or bigotry, to name just three. The message of this book is that it's always better to deal with the uncomfortable truths in your particular life than to pretend they don't exist and suffer all the more because of them later. That's a good message, even if it's framed as a Panic Attackula.

This isn't a long novel. It runs for only 260 pages in a reasonably large font size, expanded apparently from a shorter piece that the publisher recommended become a novel. Many of its paragraphs are over in a single line, one after another. Some of them are over in a single word, again one after another. Yet one paragraph, near the halfway mark, takes a couple of pages all on its own.

By the way, that may have been the moment at which I realised that this wasn't a cheat, a Lionel Fanthorpe-esque author's trick to rack up more word count. It was one more way by which Malerman could have anxiety shape the novel, because the text unfolds like Kit thinks, which is sometimes emphatic and rapid fire and attention deficit because she's a seventeen-year-old girl but sometimes an unburdening of substance, pouring out of her like a flood because her brain has to go there and she has no control over it.

The length does hurt the novel. Some readers might feel that it's padded, because it kind of was. Some might think that this would have been a better novella, with less of a focus on basketball. Some, however, might feel that bulking it up was a good choice but should have been done in a different way, adding more perspectives and giving other characters a say in the story. As it is, every time the perspective changes, we know that our new focal point is about to die and that diminishes the tension.

Above all, though, I think this is just one of those novels that isn't for everyone. It speaks very specifically to mental illness, literally manifesting it in the form of a slasher, and the readers who will understand that the most may be the ones who find themselves unable to read on, because it becomes too personal for them. I have a feeling that some people will find themselves defined by this book, which may become a moment of change in their lives, while others will have to give it away unfinished because it's too traumatic for them to get through. For a horror novel, both of those outcomes are big achievements. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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