When I compiled the Books of Horror Go To List with the members of that Facebook group, I had no idea who JP Behrens was. All I knew was that people talked about this, his debut novel, a lot. Now that I've caught up with it in my runthrough, I've experienced his work elsewhere, through a novelette or maybe novella called 'Missing in Miskatonic', a Lovecraftian hardboiled detective story that Crystal Lake Publishing sent to me for review. I loved that so eagerly dived into this. I found that the two are very different indeed.

This presumably counts as extreme horror because of all the animal cruelty, surely the trigger warning that loses most potential readers. However, it's really a touching story about a woman who merely wants to have the perfect family and is willing to go to any length to achieve that. I guess that makes it a look at the expectations of society and how dangerous it can be to try to conform to them. That sounds pretty deep, right? Well, if that's too much for you, then there's a whole heck of a lot of animal cruelty.

That's because Wanda stumbles on Nathan's secret. She's the woman that I mentioned above, a housewife who's married to Charles and they live in New England suburbia with their two sons, Nathan and Simon. Nathan's a teenager who keeps himself to himself. Simon's a much younger sibling who's turned up to ten about everything. Interestingly, my notes at the beginning of the book suggest that everyone might be summed up by a single word. Wanda's normal, Charles is minimal, Nathan's weird and Simon's enthusiastic.

We can even extend that to characters who don't live in the same house. Cindy, Wanda's former college roommate and best friend, is a bad example and Willis, her neighbour, is dull. OK, Cindy gets more than one word but you get the picture. Alternatively, Cindy's freedom while Wanda is stability. Certainly Charles is dependable, like her father. That's why she married him and they moved to the suburbs. She has a strong and very traditional picture of what a family should look like and she very much wants her family to look like that, almost down to two point four kids.

Well, some of that changes rather notably as the book runs on, but the trigger is that secret, a secret kept within the notebooks on Nathan's desk that Wanda looks through while dusting his room. They're highly detailed anatomical drawings, with copious notes, of dissected animals. It seems horrific to Wanda, who thinks future serial killer rather than dedicated scientist, and the delicate balance that she keeps in her house is forever thrown off kilter. Suddenly, this secret is hanging over everything, even though Nathan doesn't know that she knows.

That sets us to believe that we know where this is going, but I'd bet good money that precious few of us actually do. In fact, the ultimate question, once we learn where it goes, is whether it was ever on kilter, if that's even a valid term. It's a relatively shallow story if we read it as it's presented on the surface but, the more we think about it, the deeper it gets. Even as I write it up for this review, I'm wondering about all the things that aren't said and what they might be hiding. The real story is arguably hidden behind the story we see.

Initially, it's all about Nathan and what these notebooks might mean. Before long, Shelly gives up babysitting for them because he took a rat apart, vivisected it with a paring knife and fed it its own heart. She's not going to be in the same house as that. Then Wanda's called into school because Nathan's homeroom teacher has similar concerns. And, what does Nathan do with all the time he spends in the woods behind the house? What is Nathan going to do next and, maybe, who's he going to do it to?

It's worth mentioning here that, whatever else Nathan gets up to, he's almost a textbook son. He's infuriatingly polite. He's crisply proper in his use of language, never using contractions. He gets good grades. He even cleans his own room. No wonder Margery, Wanda's prim and proper mother, connects so well with Nathan, while her husband Harold, who's a wilder card, has a lot of fun getting into trouble with Simon. All these details seem superfluous while reading them, until the book turns on a dime and we start to reevaluate everything we've read thus far.

I thought about spoiling the first twist, because it arrives relatively early, at the end of the first part, almost eighty pages in to a two hundred and some page novel. Certainly the back cover is happy to inform us that the story revolves around Wanda rather than Nathan, who doesn't get a mention, and that's accurate. However, I decided not to because it really does come out of the blue and that's a shock that should be preserved for you to experience yourself.

Looking back, I can see all sorts of telling details that telegraph it but much of the point of the book, I believe, is that we don't tend to acknowledge them or, if we do, we either dismiss them outright or interpret them differently. I was reminded here of my friend the serial killer who's currently on death row awaiting an automatic appeal. Nobody in our circle had any idea that he had killed two women thirty years earlier, which was why we were happy for him to come to our houses, but after his arrest we all thought back and realised that some things made sense now.

I'm sure we've all asked ourselves why we didn't see that at the time but that weird disconnect is why this book has power. We're almost conditioned to take a story like this a certain way and most of the time, I guess, we'd be right. However, most of the time isn't all the time and that's why we get these things horribly wrong.

One detail that I keep coming back to is that the only angle we see is Wanda's. While it's told in third person, we read this book from her perspective and so we share her worry about Nathan and what his aberrant behaviour could do to her family. That seems entirely fair to us. What we don't do is look at Wanda, or indeed Charles or Cindy or anybody else, and ask questions about them. Well, it's likely that we ask a few about Charles because he believes that it's all Wanda's fault and that's weird to us, but that's about it. And that means that, by the time we turn the final page, we feel somewhat complicit in what happens and, more than that, we wonder about why we didn't see it all along.

At least that was my take and that's why this works. If you don't dig that deep, then it's going to seem extreme and offensive and maybe even ridiculous. And it's grotesque in the precise same way that Norma Desmond is grotesque when she slathers on her make-up, floats down her vast staircase and leans into the camera, saying, "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up." You can read this as grotesquerie to shock or you can read this as a human being and ask what you could have done to stop it. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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