Book Review: American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennett

Okay so I like horror as a genre, if you've perused my blog, you probably know that. I especially like reading horror.

One thing that I have historically not been into in the horror sphere is sci-fi and lovecraftian stuff. This book is both of those. And I LOVED it!

I was a bit intimidated by its size (a little under 700 pages if you have a physical copy, a little over 1,200 if you're reading it digitally through Libby like I did), and I finished it with just a day to spare of my loan. It is a book I wish I didn't have to put down, but again, it's pretty big. To finish it I did have to power through 500 pages (short, given it was on my phone), which I did within 8 hours reading on and off. It wasn't a particularly difficult read, but just complicated enough to give my brain a workout.

So the setting is an uncanny mid-century Americana style town in the early 2010s. The main character's father just died and she is going through his stuff when she finds a will left behind by her mother who had died 30 years earlier for a house in a town that does not exist on any maps. There are many different perspectives at play and as you get further in, all the pieces start clicking into place. And it is very satisfying when they do. It's kind of a mystery novel in that way.

The later sections of the book had me pacing around my house gushing to myself about how crazy it all was. I will say some bits do drag on, but that wasn't so frequent as to affect how I felt about it all. It mostly affected the sections near the end, but I also can't imagine how any of these could be made more concise.

And I really came to love some of the characters, even if they aren't what they seem at a glance.

I really loved the overarching themes of family and the nature of existence. I don't know, it was all very cool and complicated and I want a physical copy so I can reread it and annotate it.

8/10