{Put This One on Your TBR List}
Book Review: The Dead
House by Dawn Kurtagich
by Karen S. Wiesner
It's not often that the definition of a book gets shattered beyond all recognition, becoming something so radically and mind-blowingly different that some might even question whether it actually is, in fact, a book. I think the last time this happened was with electronic books (contrary to popular opinion, ebooks were not introduced by Stephen King's 2000 ebook release of Riding the Bullet, but decades prior to that by countless e-publishers and e-authors that the world wasn't yet ready to accept). I would like to claim that Dawn Kurtagich's books may be the next contender for something wholly new, but in actuality, it's just an innovative approach to a very old form of writing called "epistolary", in which a narrative is arranged in a series of letters or other documents. Some fiction examples that everyone knows include Frankenstein and Dracula. However, I believe Kurtagich's books use an extreme form of this, one that has absolutely no main character, nor an omniscient narrator, in control of the story.
The Dead House was published
in 2015 and tells the tale of a teenage girl suffering from Dissociative
Identity Disorder (DID). Two decades after a fire claimed the lives of three
students, a diary is discovered in the ruins of Elmbridge High. Another student
disappeared that night--the owner of the diary. The main suspect of the crime
and the "main character" (if it can even be said there is one in this
book) is Carly Johnson by day, Kaitlyn by night. The two leave each other
notes--mainly in a diary--and they lead very separate lives. Following the
suspicious death of the parents, the teenager was put in a psychiatric hospital
which was also a boarding school for troubled youth. The "dead house"
referred to in the title is this teenager's mind--the space she and her alter
ego share and haunt.
As we discussed, if Kurtagich's books had to be categorized, they'd probably be called epistolary novels, but they're unlike any other books I've ever read, including the two popular examples I cited in the first paragraph. I believe this author's stories are much more similar to DK (Dorling Kindersley Limited) books, a British publisher that specializes in illustrated reference guides for adults and children, available in hardback, paperback, and ebooks. I can't say for sure if DK was the first to pursue their unique book concepts, and that's a whole different discussion I won't bother getting into here. But, if you visit https://www.dk.com, you'll be able to preview some of their many offerings and this comparison I'm making will be more easily understood.
Most of DK's material falls into the nonfiction category, but there are some selections with the focus on existing fiction as well (I discovered one for R.A. Salvatore's The Legend of Drizzt {Dungeons & Dragons}!). In all of DK's works, they're chock full of information, illustrations, photographs, diagrams, boxes, sidebars, and whatnot. You almost never know where to let your attention focus first on any given page, let alone where to go from there. Each book is a feast and an extravaganza for the eyes and the mind. There's so much to view, so much to read, so much to do on each page. This marvel is almost like a work of art in itself, or like an uninhibited and uncontained stream of consciousness about a particular topic. That said, every single, busy, barely-any-white-space page is equally overwhelming, exhausting, and very difficult to process for longer than a handful of minutes at a time. More than anything else, Kurtagich's fiction novels are closer to these than to any other type of book form.
I bought two of the author's books from a used bookstore on the basis of the genre (horror), the intriguing back cover blurbs, and the compelling covers, especially the one on the first edition of The Dead House. What a gorgeous cover. But this beauty isn't skin deep. This is truly one of the most beautiful books I've ever seen--outside, and on every single page contained within the cover leaves. I admit, I didn't peek inside the books while at the bookstore. It was several weeks after my purchase that I finally opened the pages. I literally had no idea what I was in for, and I was flabbergasted almost from the very first page. This was not what I was expecting. This story is told using visuals all throughout, including psychiatrist reports, witness testimonials, video footage stills and transcripts, diary entries, sticky notes, police interviews, emails, random quotes from poems, literature, and songs, newspaper articles, photographs, drawings, and doodles. Each of these has a different look. The reader has no idea what to expect from one page to the next. Even as I found it visually stunning, I was instantly intimidated. Initially, there was a newspaper article--in the form of what looked like an actual newspaper. This was followed by two witness accounts separated by a scribbled poem that was above a picture of a note taped to the wall. Next was the first diary entry that's typed but portions have been crossed out and underlined for emphasis. That was just the beginning. Four hundred plus pages of differing media entries are in this book.
On her website, the author claimed it took her eight months to write this novel, but I'm stunned at how that could be possible, considering the sheer amount of work it would have been to not only write, revise, and polish but to format all this media imagery, etc. as well as constructing a logical sequence for arranging the nightmare events contained within the pages. I'm in awe of the massive undertaking involved. Right upfront, the reader is told what already happened--there was a fire, deaths, and the authorities have a suspect who's missing. Given that, in order to tell this tragedy, the author had to unfold the events in a logical sequence in the myriad different means she choose to convey them and all had to make sense of the mess. It's hard to imagine it only took eight months to do all that. This is far from a standard, straightforward novel that conceivably (if my personal experience has any bearing) could have taken a month or so to write chronologically without all the bells and whistles we're given here.
The one thing Kurtagich did not do is tell any part of this in the normal way a story is imparted. The most off-putting thing about this account, to me, was how it was laid out. There's a focus to the narration--Carly/Kaitlyn, yes--but there is no point-of-view (POV) main character. In fact, there are no POV characters at all, in terms of someone driving a particular scene. There aren't really any scenes, as such. I can't really describe to you how disconcerting all this was for me. In every book I read or write, I begin in the head of a POV character who sets the scene and tells one piece of the story at a time, scene by scene. I couldn't do that here. Everything I learned was in diary entries, psychiatrist reports, police or newspaper accounts, and so on. The setting is conveyed in the same way. Secondary characters are introduced through those means. Every part of this account was constructed in a fashion that defied imagining, and I couldn't find a place to settle and dig in. Imagine a scrapbook stuffed full of an erratic compilation of…well, scraps…and you'll understand my disorientation. Each time I tried to get my bearings, I was jarred out of the situation (not out of the story, per se, since it never felt like a linear, cohesive book to me at any point) by being thrust from one page to the next into another type of media.
Maybe I shouldn't be surprised by this, after reading up on the author on her website and in interviews. She declares that by the age of 18, she'd been to 15 schools across two continents, living on a mission, the bush, in city and desert. As a child, she was terrified by books because "words didn't make sense. Sentences moved on the page…" Her book-loving mother forced her to read every day, something the author hated, but, at the age of 12, after reading K.A. Applegate's Animorphs, the author had a breakthrough and monster became magic, walls windows, and dead-ends doors. She stepped through, and three of her first four novels were pre-empted (in other words, the publisher wanted it bad and offered an amount so lucrative, the book never went to auction with other publishers who might have also been interested in purchasing it).
While generally classified as a young adult psychological horror suspense novel and the focus is on teenagers, I wouldn't have allowed my young adult to read this deeply unsettling book while growing up. The recommendation is those under 15 years of age absolutely shouldn't read it, but I would up that limit to 18 at least or older. Honestly, I'm not sure I, an adult, was prepared for what awaited me within these pages. This is a disturbing account--creepy, chilling, dark, twisting, horrifying, manipulative, shocking, harrowing, gruesome and gory, insane, obsessive, and haunting. All this and more describe the icy plunge into a black world so upended, there's no way to leave it unchanged. You walk away, looking back over your shoulder in fear, feeling you've been touched by pure evil with no way to outrun it forever let alone wash it off.
I wanted to love The Dead House, or I wanted to hate it, but I couldn't really do either. There's something seriously cool and mind-blowing about the whole thing. Often as I tried to get through it, I thought maybe it would just be so much better presented in a whole different way than as a book--maybe a movie (Lime Productions has optioned it for television), a videogame, or even a VR technology experience. I also wondered if I was just too old and set in my ways when it comes to what a book is and should be and how it should be written and presented. I actually suspect that those much younger than I am, much more modern and "new-fashioned", would find this a compelling way to take in a story. So maybe it's simply not for those of my generation, who expect a story to be a narrative in standard writing form with POV characters you can actually get inside the heads of, follow around, and see the world in a different way through them.
I want to recommend Kurtagich's books, but her style is not for the faint of heart, nor is her method of madness in writing form for every reader. I highly recommend that anyone who's at least intrigued enough to find out more about her books to preview The Dead House at Amazon. If you don't like what you see there, you probably aren't the right audience for it. If you do like the sample, give the novel a shot. You might discover something new and exciting from this prolific author.
Ultimately, I have to agree at least in theory with SciFiNow, which said of The Dead House, "As a literary experiment, it's interesting; as a story, it's too depressing to enjoy." I would revise that to say, "As a literary experiment, it's interesting; as a story, it's too unconventional, too difficult and overwhelming to follow in the form it's presented."
For those interested, there's a sequel companion novella called "Naida" (a secondary character in the original work). I also read And the Trees Crept In by the author, and it's presented in a similar way as The Dead House, but not quite as extreme in its radical form. I suspect this will be true of all the author's works.
Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.
Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/
and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog
Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor
Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/
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