A History of Fear by Luke Dumas

 

Yet another deeply unsurprising and uninspiring horror novel, one that goes to great lengths to put its subtexts in garish neon, refusing to trust the reader to figure some things out. Also one that mostly doesn't bother much with the whole interesting story thing. When you see the cliches in the first thirty pages, and spot the parallels between being pursued by the devil and being closed and LGBT+ in the first hundred, and then the novel unwinds just about the way you'd expect based on that ... it's hard to have much in the way of good and happy thoughts about the novel, it's a bit of a labor (in the Herculean sense--like cleaning out the Augean stables or something) finding kind things to say. The prose is, I guess, solid enough in its inertly stolid way, this vaguely epistolary novel that doesn't shift its authorial range by even a semitone. Gawds know the characters are pretty much all a muddle, and the way the characters in the novel persist in denying what seems to be the diagetically objective truth of the main character's experiences with the devil (at least, that he had experiences with the devil) is kinda baffling, considering some of the evidence they're ignoring. Oh, well, I probably should have stopped reading the when there was a cliche so bad I reread the passage to make sure I was understanding it correctly; I did not, and I own that choice.