strange and random happenstance: Alcoholic

The Seep by Chana Porter
Published by: Soho Press
Publication Date: January 21st, 2020
Format: Kindle, 216 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

No one knows what will happen when the aliens invade. Is it the end of the world? Or the beginning of a strange new one? Trina and her partner Deeba were hosting one of their epic dinner parties to usher in whatever the future would bring. They loved to find just the perfect pairings of guests to inspire new friendships that would last a lifetime. But this time was different because the very water they were drinking would change the definition of what a lifetime is. The water was making them one with the aliens. They were creating a symbiotic relationship that would make the world a better place. No more war or poverty or death. Those who killed themselves would never know the utopia The Seep had brought. With their new lives Trina becomes an artist and then a performer, any and all of her dream careers become a reality resulting in her becoming a doctor. While her wife Deeba makes magnificent films. Their lives are perfect, The Seep has made it so. Only Deeba sees the truth, Trina isn't happy, she hasn't been happy for some time. There's only so many times you can make love and watch TV and eat ice cream before it becomes stagnant. The Seep has given them the gift of long life and change and Deeba wants to change. She wants to shed the life she has built and start again. She wants to be reborn as a baby with Trina as her mother. Trina is destroyed by this revelation. They made a commitment to each other, to be there, to love each other forever in different permutations when they married. Trina never thought her love for Deeba would last, but it hasn't just lasted, it's grown stronger. She cannot live in a world without Deeba. But now Deeba is gone, being raised by a kind family in the south of France and Trina is an alcoholic. She doesn't go to work, she doesn't pull her weight, she is a blight on The Seep's perfect world. A chance encounter will send her on a journey. She must accept that things change or she must do what she's thought of many, many times before, and end her long life.

The Seep has pretensions to be something it's not. It wants to be a different kind of alien invasion story but ends up being nothing more than basic. A basic science fiction trope; aliens arrive and want to make us happy and perfect but they can't grasp that suffering is what makes us human. But Chana Porter could have taken it in a different direction. There are characters, like Deeba, who see that they could have a life without trauma and jump at the chance, even if her request of Trina is unconscionable. This could have sparked a conversation about humans and their belief that suffering is somehow part of the journey when it doesn't have to be. Instead we suffer through the misery of Trina's journey. We're trapped with a depressive suicidal alcoholic who can not come to grips with the fact that change is part of life. When Trina asks another character to never change they rightly respond that that's "a very cruel thing to ask of anyone." That line had a sort of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland vibe, a truth spoken to the ignorant in a moment of revelation on her journey. And that is why I didn't outright hate this book, there are moments that have brilliance and such depth that I want to explore them because the author didn't seem to understand where her focus should be in this short narrative. I'm thinking in particular when her friend and fellow performer Horizon says that his face isn't his face but that of his dead lover who was a person of color while he himself is really white. That revelation again goes back to what makes us human, what makes us who we are, and while exposing him is part of Trina's journey, there seems to be so much left unsaid about appropriation. I wanted the deeper parts of Alice's journey not the visuals of a hookah smoking caterpillar. And there are so many visuals of the utopia that allows grass to be carpet and people to have horns that the human message is lost. And I can't help feeling that these characters are just so insufferably entitled that I would have gladly read about anyone else. You don't care about them. They are loosely drawn and while the opening and closing dinner parties are assuredly written, I kept thinking, but I would never want to be there. I do not like these people and never will. They are too precious for words.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: Alcoholic, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alien Invasion, Appropriation, Chana Porter, Change, Deeba, Entitled, For the Love of Book Clubs, Horizon, Human Nature, LGBTQ, Suicidal, The Seep, Trauma, Trina, Utopia

The House Across the Lake by Riley Sager
Published by: Dutton
Publication Date: June 21st, 2022
Format: Hardcover, 368 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy

Casey Fletcher started drinking the day her husband drowned in Lake Greene. But her grief has become so all encompassing that it's destroying her life. For awhile she had her drinking under control and then she didn't. Passing out cold in the play she was staring in on Broadway and having to be dragged offstage while unconscious by her costars was literally her career vanishing down the bottle. Her mother swooped in and banished Casey to the Lake House in Vermont. The house where Casey spent the last happy moments of her life before it all went to hell. Now her mother and her cousin call daily to check in. Her acting skills are put to the test by declaring she's not drinking because of course she is. Her neighbor Eli is supplying her with the booze her mother had hoped to deny her. The lake is as deserted as it always is this late in the year. There are only five houses on Lake Greene. The Fitzgeralds have already left for the season, Eli is always there, and handyman Boone is working on the A-Frame next door. Which leaves the glass house directly across from Casey. And the inhabitants of that house are about to throw a wrench in Casey's plan to drink herself into oblivion. Casey sees someone drowning out on the lake and rushes into action and saves her new neighbor Katherine Royce. Like Katherine knows who Casey is, Casey knows who Katherine is, the supermodel turned philanthropist who's married to tech guru Tom Royce. The girl who had the billboard in Time Square that captivated the world and Casey. They are the owners of the glass house. That night Tom and Katherine come across the lake to thank Casey and since Eli is already over they take the party outside and Eli gets to telling ghost stories around a fire. The evening is cut short when Katherine passes out. She and her husband return home but Casey is worried about Katherine and gets out her husband's binoculars. Watching the Royces becomes her new obsession. One that might prove deadly when Katherine disappears.

The House Across the Lake marks a turning point for Riley Sager. In his previous books that have hauntings or other paranormal phenomenon he meticulously pulls back the curtain to prove that it was humans all along, just an old man under a mask solved thanks to Scooby and the gang. Here he does not. And I love it. I was a little sad when the Camp Nightingale disappearances was a revenge well plotted. As for the mysteries at the Bartholomew being at the feet of the elite, well, couldn't I have had just a hint of the real horrors of Rosemary's Baby? As for Baneberry Hall and House of Horrors, it was sadly human horrors. The genius in making the paranormal real in this specific book is that Riley Sager is doing a spot on pastiche to the Gillian Flynn genre that was so lovingly and accurately skewered by Kristen Bell's The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window. There's a predictability to this genre that relies on copious amounts of alcohol and unreliable narrators and Riley Sager does a good job leaning into these tropes with Carrie Fisher, I mean Casey Fletcher, as his protagonist. Husbands, neighbors, everyone is a suspect when her neighbor disappears. Yet what is really happening goes back to a ghost story that Eli told around Casey's fire pit. It's a moment that is almost a blink and you'll miss it moment. There are so many other elements at play in that scene that what Eli has to say gets lost in the kerfuffle. In fact, I was so busy putting together the other parts of the jigsaw I lost sight of the bigger picture so that it was a nice surprise to realize the kind of book I thought I was reading wasn't what I was reading at all. As a reader it's really wonderful when your expectations are proved wrong. When a book turns out not to be what you expected, but better. While Riley Sager is a must buy author for me after this twist I can't wait to see what he writes next.