What can I say? Once again, I was lured in by all the hallmarks of something promising. An author’s debut psychological thriller. Undertones of noir. A marriage disintegrating into darkness. Abounding comparisons to Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train. What could go wrong?

The marketing department did little to help Harrison start off on the right foot. Touting this book as a taught thriller was an enormous mistake bound to leave readers feeling bitter. There is nothing taught about this novel. It drags its feet through every chapter, every drawn-out, over-saturated description, every stream-of-consciousness monologue bound for nowhere. For the amount of actual plot in this book, the page count could have been cut in half without sacrificing anything worth remembering. Where Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train pulsate with tangible urgency, The Silent Wife wanders and sighs its way to a climax that we’ve been expecting since literally page one. There is no spoiler in saying that the wife plots to kill the husband because he’s a cheat, and there’s nothing beyond that worth mentioning.

Even if Harrison’s publicist had promoted the book as what it is, an inspection of the psychology behind a broken marriage, the end product would still fall flat. The fact that it doesn’t know what it’s trying to be is only the first of its many defects. The psychological aspect of the book (the part that always most intrigues me), was shallow and full of predictable tropes. The husband is nothing more than a caricature, at times amusing but never convincingly human. The wife, whose perspective dominates the narration, is imperceptive and weak-willed. Neither have convincing motives for their actions, be it cheating or killing, and the result feels forced. They are not sympathetic or relatable; neither is worth cheering for, and neither is worth trying to understand. Less than halfway through the book, I was already engulfed by apathy for the whole rotten business.

I have yet to read a domestic thriller that comes anywhere close to the deep, dark humanity of Gone Girl, but stories like this one make me wonder if authors even try anymore. The husband is always the despicable cheat, the tyrant, the dog. The wife is always smart but submissive—and painfully domestic. In this particular book, she’s also a psychologist, and her side of the story is peppered with pretentious transcripts from sessions with her therapist. The sudden jumps in mode is reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early experimentation mixing poetry and script and prose in This Side of Paradise, and while not near as impressive, this feels every bit as ostentatious.

Worst of all is the writing itself. I am baffled and, honestly, infuriated by the reviews praising Harrison’s style. Have we forgotten what good, clean prose looks like? How can anyone mistake this for talent? The only remarkable thing about Harrison’s writing is the sheer volume of repetition she manages to contain in one paperback. Robert Southey said, “If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams — the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.” Beyond the stale characters and the tired plot, the book’s greatest fault is this: every page is watered down with pretentious superfluity, and it completely takes away any deep burn Harrison wants to inflict on readers. And when I say every page, I mean all of it— the exposition, the action, and the dialogue equally. Don’t believe me?

No one enjoys wading through paragraph after paragraph of boring descriptions. Writers are perpetually reminded how short the reader’s attention span is when it comes to descriptions, and yet it’s as if Harrison is purposefully testing the limits of our patience. She feels the need to narrate every mundane moment of the characters’ daily lives in mind-numbing detail. Here’s one of my favorites. Just count the adjectives.

Walking beside her in the radiant dusk, in the otherworldly trafficless quiet of the small rural community, lapped by scented breezes, the air itself a lulling bath, he felt that his life could finally begin, that she was the god he would worship and the talisman that would make things come out right.

Or check out this riveting description of a man eating a sandwich:

Harry bites into his sandwich, chews, swallows, runs his tongue over his upper and lower teeth, drinks from his pint glass, and belches politely with a hand over his mouth. When he speaks, his voice is a deeply purring baritone.

And then there’s the dialogue, which is clunky and uncomfortable to the max, like this exchange:

“That’s nice,” she says. “Do you miss me?”

“Of course I miss you. I miss you every day.”

She takes a breath and lets it out. “I’m here,” she says.

“Yeah. Well. I didn’t think…”

“I know. We parted on not such great terms.”

“Even the sound of your voice,” he says. “It’s nice.”

Not such great terms. Because that just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? And would someone say “nice” one more time, please? Also, apparently husbands and wives enjoy repeating themselves when they’re upset:

“So you did know. You knew all along.”

“I didn’t believe it. I didn’t think you would go through with it.”

But! What they enjoy even more is repeating each other:

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”

“And why is that? Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“Because I didn’t know myself what I was going to do.”

“You knew I’d kick you out is why you didn’t tell me.”

“That’s not true.”

“I would have kicked you out.”

“Yes, but that’s not what I was thinking.”

“What were you thinking, Todd?”

Getting the picture yet? The only reason I flew through this book so quickly was because I’m in the process of editing my own novel, and I was afraid that if I spent too much time wading through this mess, some of Harrison’s many, many bad habits might start rubbing off on my own work. Shudder.