I just finished
The Town That Forgot How To Breathe, by Kenneth Harvey. By turns, it had me
and
, but unfortunately the last quarter of the book was by far the weakest part. Some parts were really, really well-written, though. I dunno.
The basic premise: A man, separated from his wife but still much in love with her, takes his eight-year-old daughter back to his ancestral Newfoundland fishing village for a vacation, amidst weird Stephen Kingish locals (mostly the mystical You City Folk Don't Know Crap type, not the hiding-knives type, although there are some of those, too). Meanwhile, strange things are afoot -- or afin, I guess, as the ocean starts behaving badly, producing wonders and monsters and ill omens. And the little girl has the Shine -- I mean, second sight, and can talk to ghosts and see auras and so on, just like some of the locals.
OK, but most of the first third of the book is well-written, with good characterization and some really effective weirdness. However, it's not very horror-novel. It's severely depression-novel. Scary things do not happen; things that are really depressing happen. This guy's problems with his wife are kind of heartbreaking; they had a really passionate marriage that simply lost its passion, confusing them both, and they started getting on each other's nerves, but he can't move on, and she's in a relationship now with some guy she doesn't like, and and and . . . .
Meanwhile, the woman who lives next door to the vacation house has even
worse problems. Much worse. Oh, and a lot of people in town have a 'disease' where they forget how to breathe.
That could have been played up as scary, but, alas, it never even really winds up making much sense, and it gets pretty underplayed.
Then . . . the book gets seriously weird. The main character goes crazy (again, fairly
Shining-style), almost entirely at once, and the book is never clear on
why. There are many possible reasons, but it's never explained. Boy, though, is he convincingly and dangerously crazy. One thing this author can write is a crazy person's interior monologue: disorganized, hostile, full of category errors and anxiety that he might do something terrible or might terribly
fail to do something horrible that desperately needs to be done for some reason that made sense just a minute ago . . . .
The madness gets out of hand, though, to the point where a bunch of scenes later in the book make no sense. And the surreal events get way out of hand, too, with ghosts, spirit technology, bizarre corpses, halucinations, shapechanging, portents and signs, precognition, aura-reading, mermaids and sea monsters, natural disasters . . . . The Army gets involved, and suddenly there's a bunch of science fiction that was, um, poorly researched. Radio waves, microwaves, and gamma rays get conflated, and it gets ill-advisedly complicated and odd. I mean, half-assed
Dr Who-episode weird, which does not fit with the tone of the rest of the book.
Mostly, it seems like he wrote himself into a corner -- Strange Things Happen! And then he felt he needed to explain how and why those things happened, and the explanation is intensely unsatisfying. Also, the main plot gets left behind and only barely touched on, and the anti-climax could kill us all.
It wound up reminding me of the eventual explanation to the Riverworld series, where I really, really wished I had never read the explanation part, because it ruined the entire series for me.
A really weird book. Also, I kept looking at the author photo and being convinced that the author is actually some other guy, only I can't remember who. Damned book messed with my head.
