Anybody Home? (review)
General content warning: this is a review of a horror novel designed to be pretty disturbing. I'm not going into intense specifics but if you're sensitive to that type of thing, please scroll on by!
I picked up Anybody Home? by Michael Seidlinger on a bit of a whim after seeing a few book review influencers on YouTube recommend it and noticing the cover looked pretty scary, and well, that's a dicey method for finding new reads at the best of times.
The book's conceit is that a veteran home invader and torture-murderer is coaching a first-time killer through a job. A chilling enough premise, and one I thought might lend itself to some good creeping dread, or at least have an interesting villain protagonist. The narration is mostly in second person, and the 'you' is rather poorly defined (actually, everyone in this book is poorly defined).
I think that premise could have become a really effective horror novel, but the book is less interested in providing scares than providing commentary--there's a whole framework where the home invaders are not only planning these crimes, but also filming them and rendering them unto "the cults" for possible cinematic adaptation. It gets very metafictional very fast, and reads less like a veteran killer giving advice to a mentee than it does like an extended ramble on how to make a horror movie, and all the characters' pre-planning of the horrible job seems more like advice on how to forestall audience criticism.
All that might have worked if the book had a bit more to say, really, but it repeats itself so much and conveys so little. I was thoroughly unsurprised to see in the 'about the author' that Seidlinger wrote a whole book on House of Leaves, since Anybody Home? is clearly taking inspiration from that book and its metafictional complexity, but this work has none of the specificity that makes House of Leaves seem like an actual artifact, and none of its thematic depth.
The victims in the story are never named, and are clearly meant to be archetypal, but they come across as such bland suburban-malaise stereotypes that it's difficult to shake the feeling the narrative is just moving stand-in numbers around, to be filled in with actual characters later. This is almost certainly the point, given that what we're reading is essentially a storyboard for a horror movie, but it makes for a really dull reading experience.
A few sections have a bit more interest--the description of the future invaders casing the home really does inspire a fair amount of dread, and the narrative finally delves into specificity when discussing the layout of the house and the sabotages planned. There's also glimpses of a more interesting story when some of the invaders turn against one another, but nothing really comes of that.
A few other nitpicks that annoyed me--the not-quite right explanation of what creepypasta is, the reference to the teenage son reading porn magazines (in 2023? please, the kid has a phone and a laptop), the assurance that teenagers have been desensitized by video games.
Not recommended, unless I guess you really really loved the movie Cabin in the Woods and you think a second-person version of a story with extremely similar themes sounds too intriguing to pass up.
