Book
The Watchers by AM Shine
Synopsis
Artist Mina is driving through a desolate part of Connemara when her car breaks down, right on the edge of a dense, dark forest. She goes into the woods looking for help. After dark falls, she hears bloodcurdling shrieks from all around, and she finds a stranger urgently rushing her into the only safe place after dark: a plain concrete bunker with a huge glass wall, and a bright light that shines all night to let the unseen creatures of the forest watch the human residents.
Notes
This was another book that was a recommended read in folk horror. I’d say it does qualify as a modern take on folk horror, but I’m wary of saying too much more about it, for fear of ruining whatever it is that makes it work.
And I say “whatever it is” because I’m still not exactly sure how it works. I started the book and was immediately concerned that I was going to have to abandon it, because it was somehow both overwritten and underwritten. It was full of these almost-florid descriptions of things that somehow completely failed to evoke a solid image of anything. It felt as if it were mimicking the action-description-tangential memory rhythm of novels just because that’s what novels are supposed to do. But I thought that’s just the prologue, I’ll see what happens once it gets started.
Then I thought that I was only into chapter 2, but I already disliked the protagonist. The book establishes her as the type of person who takes out a sketchpad in public and stares intently at strangers while she draws them without their permission, and those people are just the worst. And then a few chapters later, I was thinking that the premise seemed kind of implausible, and there had to be a more straightforward way to get a solitary woman alone in a forest. And then I thought that I’m several chapters in, and I still can’t picture the main setting for the bulk of the book from its descriptions, and the only reason I’ve got a mental picture of it at all is from the trailer for the movie adaptation from last year. And then I thought I’m only a quarter of the way through this book, and I can already see the ending coming from a mile away. And then I thought that I was barely halfway through the book, and it seemed way too obvious so there must be something else going on. And then I realized that I’d read three quarters of the book and it was way past my bedtime and I should go to sleep. (And immediately picked it up again and finished it the second I got home).
It’s got this propulsive energy that doesn’t so much make up for my criticisms as it renders them completely irrelevant. I still can’t say I feel any sort of attachment to any of the characters in the slightest, and yet I was desperate to know what happened to them. Does it even make sense for me to complain about clunky passages when I was this compelled to keep reading?
Verdict
One of the damndest experiences I’ve ever had reading a book. My blurb would be “a folk horror suspense thriller in the post-Lost age.” I don’t even know if I’d recommend it, but my experience wasn’t so much reading it as consuming it whole, gristle and all.