Have you ever watched the movie Grave Encounters & thought to yourself, wow, I love this, but I wish it had more physics??? ….Okay, reading that back makes it sound like I’m being facetious, but I’m not at all. That’s kind of how I would elevator pitch this book. It’s like Grave Encounters with more physics, a touch of influence from House of Leaves, & a vibe like it’s the 60s & we were all just enlightened. And I love that.
This is a found footage, mixed media novel about a group of ghost hunters trying to keep their TV show afloat with their pivotal thirteenth episode, which they’re filming inside a house that used to be the HQ for a somewhat controversial group called the Paranormal Research Foundation. But once there, they end up getting way way more than just good TV. I absolutely loooved the found footage aspect of this. Y’all know I love found footage, I’m BWP obsessed, and I’m always a sucker for mixed media. I just like seeing stories told in different ways, it’s a lot of fun, so I really enjoyed this format, especially because it’s entirely believable that they would have all this documentation – raw footage, emails to producers, texts between sisters, diaries. I like how it all pieces together to tell the story.
But I think the marketing of this book kind of buried the lede. What I loved most about the book was that although it starts out as a ghost story of sorts, it’s really about so much more than ghosts. It’s about—everything, in a way. It’s about what we are made of, what the universe is made of, & our place within it. It’s about how time & space & existence work in ways that are, at times, nearly incomprehensible to our minds. I loved the way Claire talks about their discoveries, & it is difficult to talk about without spoiling things, but there’s one part where she talks about what has happened to them that was so impactful it was like a mental gut punch.
There’s only two things I didn’t like about this book. One is the interjections about how people were feeling in between the “raw footage” segments. Like the footage would describe the investigators sitting together talking, & one of them would say something and then there’d be an interjection in italics that says “Jesse felt anxious”. I wish the author hadn’t done that, because for one, if it’s found footage there’s absolutely no reason that description of feeling would be there. But also, just let the raw footage speak for itself. One of the best parts of Blair Witch Project, for example, is watching the characters fall apart through their actions & their words — not someone TELLING us they were terrified. We know they are. We can see them. Let the footage speak for itself.
The other thing I didn’t like was how long it took the characters to dive into the PRF’s files. They discovered they were there immediately & I thought they would have jumped right in, possibly out of curiosity, but also to see if it could aid their own investigation in any way, but we have to wait til page 186 for them to get into them?! I was dying to see what was in there! The payoff on that one, though – totally worth the wait.
I really enjoyed this & I will probably recommend it to a lot of people. Know that it’s a ghost story, but know that it’s also much more than that, too. Come for the found footage, stay for the secrets of the universe.