Books of 2026: AMERICAN ELSEWHERE by Robert Jackson Bennett.
Y'all. I try to stack my reading material with my writing projects, so I picked this up because it looked perfectly Driscoll-related, and I'm not sure I have ever been more correct about any book in my entire life??? It's like this man climbed into my head thirteen years ago and scooped out every embryonic shred of Driscoll and shoved it into this massive, weird, funny, fucked up book, so really I was doomed from the start.
I think the back cover summary is a little too tame on its own. It catches the weirdness and the "things are not quite what they seem," and a lot of the cover blurbs are about Bennett's other horror work, but I think they're applicable to this one, too ("a deft amalgam of thriller, cerebral horror, and American Gothic"; "Compelling and truly horrifying," all that). File American Elsewhere under weird and horror and ~supernatural~ and SF (any time there are loadbearing physicists, I feel like it warrants SF) and fantasy, in that order.
The story mostly follows Mona Bright, ex-cop and house-in-a-town-that-doesn't-exist-on-maps inheritor, who is badass and competent and a mess. Her perspective is intercut with many other perspectives, some of which are experimental (and y'all know I love that!). It is a very long book, and other readers did not enjoy the meander, but it absolutely scratches the itch I have right now. It takes 200 pages to get into something resembling a Problem-Solving Plot. Everything up until then rides so heavily on vibes, but wow I loved those vibes.
It gives House of Leaves, it gives Welcome to Night Vale, it gives some Jeff VanderMeer, it gives what I suspect may be some Stephen King (I say, having never read Stephen King), it gives Lovecraftian (I say, having read primarily authors' of color and/or queer authors' Lovecraft-inspired takes, and no actual Lovecraft myself). It is also very much Mommy Issues: The Doorstopper, and Such a Book.
An incomplete list of elements that are exactly my jam: eyes in incongruous jars as the first page teaser; fucked up shit happening between paired mirrors; road trips and liminal spaces; people who aren't and eldritch monsters in the woods; deserts and cars; weird rules and weirder insular little towns; broken time and pandimensionality; loopholes and talking through type; body horror and gore; No Longer Being Yourself; scientists fucking shit up; hunger and hollowness and alienation and belonging; and everything about this late-book passage:
"have you never felt different from other people throughout your life? Detached, adrift? Have you never wondered why you appear to age at a much slower rate than anyone you know? Have you not found the fact that you, and you alone out of the human race, have visited the other side--even if it was only for a moment--and come back whole and unharmed, to be slightly odd? Do you not find it queer that your arrival in this town--this bizarre, surreal, strange town, where nothing has ever happened for decades--coincides with every terrible event that has happened recently? And do you not somehow feel that you have been to this town before, that you know that it is, in some indefinable, intangible way, a home you never visited, but knew was waiting for you, all along, all throughout your life?" (American Elsewhere, p521)
I laughed out loud many times, I howled at my own walls about How Perfect This Is For Driscoll Vibes, I sent so many snaps of snippets to people unprompted, I hurt myself trying to read this 662-page behemoth in bed, I have not been able to stop thinking about it for the week it's taken me to read it. The only (only!!!) thing I did not love was the lost pregnancy thread, but I'm glad I did not let that derail me, because the rest was so worth it.
(CW, spoilery: There is, however, a LOT of suicide/parents killing their children and then themselves toward the end, graphic.)
