The Book of Accidents - Filled With Horror and Deeply Emotional
“He said, traditionally, a coffin needed only ten nails to be closed. ‘Ten nails to close a coffin,’ he said again and again, and then he added, ‘But it takes ninety-nine to kill the world.’”
Maddie and Nate are concerned about their teenage son Oliver, he’s empathetic to the point of damaging himself. After a school shooting drill, Oliver is so overcome with emotions and fear that he wets himself. He’s not allowed to watch the news or really be around any sort of grief or horror because he will take it into himself fully. What his parents don’t know though is that Oliver can SEE other people’s pain and that’s why it’s so overwhelming.
When Nate’s abusive shithead father finally passes away, Nate takes on his childhood home and property out of the city. The family see it as a fresh start and the three move in. At first it’s great, like it always is in stories like these. But then Maddie, a sculpturist, blacks out while creating a piece of art and somehow it comes to life. Nate is seeing his dead father’s ghost and strange figures in the woods. And Oliver? He meets a new friend who might actually be magical.
And soon the family find themselves in the middle of a chaotic tornado of murder, killers, violence, and unexplained phenomena.
FULL SPOILERS AHEAD - YOU’VE BEEN WARNED
BOOK MOOD BOARD - all images found on weheartit.com
This book BRINGS the horror ya’ll. From the opening chapters you are thrust into a violent and slightly strange world. As the main characters are slowly introduced you almost have to catch your breath and centre yourself again. I was hoping to be spooked, and I got that, what I didn’t realize would happen would be that I was deeply moved by many moments in this story. There’s a lot of talk about intrusive thoughts, doubt, guilt - my normal weekly therapy topics - and it felt cathartic to read it and relate but also to come to a sense of acceptance that this is reality, this is life, and you just have to do your best and you’re never as alone as you feel you are.
But the horror - we’ve got this terrifying tunnel that appears in all the strange worlds in the story, sometimes it’s an abandoned mine, and sometimes it’s an abandoned ghost tunnel for a carnival. It’s so creepy and the chapters of Jake as a child lost down there, struggling to survive are crazy claustrophobic and freaky. There’s also a serial killer who plays a part in this story - he’s really creepy. And Wendig is clever with him in the sense that he’s always just lurking off in the background and popping up via his victims or the devastation he leaves behind, or hiding in a freakin abandoned ghost tunnnneelllll.
In real life horror terms - there’s a lot of talk of abuse (especially child abuse) and addiction in this book so please be wary going in if those are triggers for you. I felt Wendig handled it phenomenally and sensitively. There’s no gratuitous and unnecessarily included violence, everything happens to move the plot and the characters along and to bring a powerful arc to a few of the characters.
“Don’t do that. Don’t make it okay that men are monsters. If we are, we need to own that. It’s not better or worse when one of your parents is an abuser and the other isn’t, Carl. It’s awful either way.”
I found the idea of multiple worlds compelling and it never got too complex or silly. The inclusion of magic in a horror novel can sometimes become a bit ridiculous, but this dark magic and parallel worlds felt real and terrifying.
I think Maddie may be my favourite character. She’s a mother figure without having to be a typical matriarch sacrificing herself for her family in a horror novel realness. She’s an artist, she has an anxiety disorder, she loves her family but she also gets annoyed by her husband and doesn’t truly understand her teenage son. You know...like a real mom. I loved that her art came to life to save her and her family, I loved the little guardian owls she created, and I loved the final reveal of her building doors to travel through the worlds. I just think she’s swell ya’ll, a real lovable badass artist.
“Because, my boy, when the time comes, when your head’s just full of…” She gesticulated wildly, her fingers scribbling madly in the orbit of her skull. “Nonsense, the best way to machete the weeds and drown out the static is to go make something. So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to go and make something. For us. For the world. We make.”
This may be a thicc boi, running over 500 pages, but it reads FAST. Do not be put off by length. Every word feels needed for this complex and emotional story. As you near the end of the tale, so many pieces fall into place in the most satisfying way making it a really entertaining read.
Overall, I highly recommend this for any horror fan. But especially if you love dark magic, owls, thunderstorms, serial killers, art come to life, mysteries, jigsaw puzzles, complex characters, D&D, ghosts, creepy abandoned tunnels….do I need to list more? No, go read it!
“The best we can do, I think, is to figure out how to move forward. How we correct the errors that we made to give some peace to ourselves. And to those we may have hurt. Or so I like to hope.”
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