The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

 

This is an intricate novel, probably overcomplicated for the story it tells, with antecedents ranging from Barker to Borges to folklore from all over. Lots of flashy non-linearity that works well enough but doesn't add as much to the telling as it might. Seems as though it wants to say things about how our identity ends up tangled in the stories we tell about ourselves, but comes across as unnecessarily meta, with the novel itself being one of the stories the library in the novel keeps. I am happy to see a relatively recent novel written in such heightened poetic language as this, but I wish the actual story had worked better for me.