I have a commute for the first time in years and I almost looked forward to it just to listen to more of this book. This is a great exercise in unreliable narration that I would absolutely have DNF'd if I was reading it manually. It is a very slow burn of a coming of age story that, to me, seems to be building upon the house that King built. This is most apparent in the pacing and certain assumptions about what an interesting protagonist looks like. It's not quite Kingesque, because King rarely (per my recollection) wrote about the space between childhood and adulthood, and the fears that live there. Tremblay did, mainly by writing a protagonist that never quite made it out of the mental headspace of a 17-year-old. I'm trying to say that this is a certain kind of story, perhaps part of a certain horror tradition. "Vibe" comps for this might be King's conventions meet the tone of Gus Moreno's This Thing Between Us or Sarah Gailey's Just Like Home.

My central problems with this book orient around Art, the protagonist who wrote this memoir (novel) we are reading. He was the most boring fucked up character I've read in ages. Sometimes a character is fucked up in a way that makes you go OOOHH. Not so with Art Barbara. His arc is a common one in horror—one of decline—and it is mainly this convention, rather than the allegations of vampirism, that makes this a horror novel. Even his decline was incredibly sleepy. There is a point soon after the midpoint where Art says something like, "I bet you're waiting for more Mercy," and I was! To be clear, Mercy is a classic manic pixie dream girl, and Art is exactly the sort of character that a MPDG happens to. This is vampiric Garden State. Art's life is nothing until he meets Mercy; it's a story of Mercy's effect on him; it is not a story about Mercy, except in Mercy's interjections, and I'm thankful for this because I only barely liked her better than Art. Through Art, we know almost nothing about Mercy. It does not feel like a reciprocal friendship, though this is in part because it's not; Mercy provides for Art in fundamentally different ways than Art provides for Mercy, and that discrepancy is felt in the text in a way that, unfortunately, didn't transfer well to the format of the book.

Mercy's additions, however, were an absolute highlight, even if how the character was written didn't really work for me. What I enjoyed about this book was its structure, its reflexivity. Every time Mercy responded to something Art said in the margins, it contributed to a progressive layering of whose "truth" is most supported by the text. Suspense comes solely in the form of whose version to believe; Art seems increasingly detached from reality in part because of the behavior he describes, but mainly because Mercy tells us how concerned she is about how detached he is from reality. There's something I don't quite understand about the book: why, given what we come to learn, Mercy says what she says earlier on. Is she ever really talking to Art, or is this a performance for the hypothetical reader of the manuscript she's editing? I think it makes the entire book internally inconsistent, but I was so caught up in doing my detective work on the narrative that I forgot to care too much.

I picked this up for its structure and for Xe Sands' audio narration—she's great, I seek her out on purpose and she managed to give life to a character who textually fell flat for me—and was disappointed on neither point. Come for the unreliable narrator exercise, stick out the less than stellar character work for a satisfying ending that... may cancel out elements of the rest of the book. I wanted to know what happened the whole time! That's not a bad book! Narration and structure created the suspense! In that respect it achieved something very cool.