Monday, November 7, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy/Horror Book Review: Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey

 



Just Like Home is the latest novel from author Sarah Gailey, one of the more fascinating authors of both long and short sci-fi/fantasy in the past few years.  Their works are always really interesting in themes and characters, whether that be a story dealing heavily with abuse and how it shapes generations and perpetuates itself like The Echo Wife or a Queer YA Fantasy like When We Were Magic, etc etc.  I haven't always liked Gailey's works - I find they tend to struggle with endings, which tend to seem abrupt and ill fitting of what came before, but they're almost always fascinating...and sometimes very powerful as they deal with serious and strong themes.  

Just Like Home is another strong work - this time a psychological and maybe more horror novel about what it is to be monstrous, and about parental abuse and caring and how that shapes someone - particularly its protagonist Vera, the daughter of an abusive/neglectful mom and a loving dad who turned out to be a horrifying serial killer.  The story works pretty well atmospherically as Vera returns home at the behest of her dying mother, deals with a creepy artist fascinated by her old house, and deals with strange visions and messages popping up, and doesn't go in some of the directions you might have guessed as it jumps back and forth in time to reveal the events of the past.  It's really well done, creepy and strong at times, but at the same time, parts of the setup feel kind of abrupt, so it still doesn't quite all work.

More after the jump:

-------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------
Vera Crowder has spent the last few years of her life wandering from place to place, job to job....with each stop lasting until someone connects the dots, recognizes her last name, and she becomes too much trouble for her worth for her employer.  But then her estranged mother Daphne called her and said that she was dying and begged her to come home to take care of their house, Crowder House.  The house where Vera was raised lovingly by her father (and without much care from her mother)....the house where her father was revealed to be a heinous serial killer.  

Vera returns to the house intending just to take care of it and maybe go on with her life.  There she finds her rude mother, dying in a way she can barely bare to watch, as well as a creepy artist who is stripping the house for the sake of his awful art.  

But as she explores the house where it all happened, she begins to find strange things: bits and pieces of her father's long hidden journal, all about her, and begins to have monstrous nightmare and visions of what's happening around her, as if some monstrous force remains inside the house and even under her bed.  But Vera's father is long gone, her mother is bedridden and the artist can't be behind these happenings, so what is truly going on?  And how does it connect to the past of Vera's childhood that she has so desperately left behind?  
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Just like Home takes place entirely from the perspective of Vera, although the story jumps back and forth in time: with the story occasionally jumping back to Vera's childhood to reveal what really happened during her father's serial killing days.  Readers might be concerned at first that the past segments aren't really adding much, as the fact that Vera's dad was a serial killer is kinda spoiled by the book's jacket, plot summaries online, and really implied in the present....but the past segments do a lot more than merely revealing that, and are instead used to really show how Vera was raised by both her father and other - with her father, despite the monster he is, being a kind caring man just beset by mental illness about what he believes about other people...and her mother on the other hand, being a spiteful neglectful woman who wants his attention to be on her rather than their daughter.  And of course things in the past are not quite what they seem to everyone else in the future, particularly when it came to Vera's own complicity in her father's acts.  

I'm oversimplifying a lot here, and the book uses its present story to be incredibly creepy at times, as Vera feels like she's losing her mind, finds hints of her father that bring back these memories, and make both her and the author question what's going on.  Here is a girl who was cut adrift by her parents and the system, whose future has either required her to reject her past (by changing her name to go incognito, something she had no interest in) or to come back to it....only to find a man there literally stripmining it for his own sick version of beauty.  She has never found a new home after this house was taken from her, so the nightmare of monstrous things happening in it are especially unsettling to her, just as much as the artist is. 

And with the only person in her life who cared for her turning out to be a serial killer she thought then never reached out to her from jail (turns out early not to be true), and with a mother whose neglect and dislike of her as the only other parent in her life, well the story makes a strong case for how parental abuse and neglect can have devastating effects...with Vera being an extreme example.  And it leads to a horror-filled conclusion where Vera takes extreme actions in order to maintain something for herself as it's all seemingly crumbling apart - which I will not spoil here.

Not everything works here, while the ending is actually strong for a Gailey novel and actually is fitting, certain characters and elements, most notably the artist Duvall, disappear for long stretches so they don't quite pose as strong a barrier or obstacle as they should be when they come back into play - it's supposed to be a horror what he is doing to the house, but Vera basically never sees him significantly for like 2/3 of the book, so when he emerges as a major force to be dealt with later it doesn't quite land.  Similarly, her mother Daphne disappears at times which makes her neglectful abuse a bit less overt and I think that could've been a bit more on page.

But Just Like Home is still a really strong horror dealing with parental neglect, abuse, and a fucked up life and possibly fantastical horror that results when it all comes apart, and is well worth your time.  
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