Short and Surprisingly Stale

    I am at the point with Josh Malerman, author of Bird Box, Incidents Around the House, and others, that I’ll give anything he does a read. Pictures of You, Malerman’s latest, is short, taut, and to the point – in essence, all qualities a busy man like me looks for in a Halloween read, but at the same time, it is also a little slow maybe just the tiniest bit boring, and a tad bit anticlimactic.

         While on a romantic getaway in a small, lakeside Michigan town, a young couple, Jack and Emily, wake up after a night of drinking to a nightmare: Emily wakes up in a strange room with a bizarre older woman claiming to be an artist (Emily, consequently, being her art), and Jack wakes up without Emily and memory of their parting the night before. While Jack searches the town, worrying that his possibly pregnant girlfriend has gotten cold feet and run off, Emily realizes very quickly she is, in essence, the prisoner of a very disturbed woman, who claims she has Jack locked up in the other room and has a simple-minded accomplice in her experimental work.

            The premise, described by some as “Hitchcockian,” starts off strong. Malerman draws the reader in to Jack’s increasing paranoia that not only is Emily missing, but that something might have happened to her, and Emily’s desperate attempts to reason with and eventually escape her captor. But for a relatively short novel, the story plods along. It is a lot of back and forth between Emily and Helen (her captor) and a lot of Jack asking around town if anyone’s seen Emily. You know the two perspectives will intersect at some point, and when it does, it’s as dull as the rest of the book. If the climax, when it finally comes, is supposed to be shocking, it isn’t. It’s just there.

            Malerman is one of the best horror authors working today, and like any writer, he’ll have his ups and downs. I always appreciate simple stories in single locations, but this one just didn’t grab me.