Review: The Night Strangers

The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian

My rating: 1 of 5 stars



The best thing about this novel was the description on this inside jacket. On the surface, it sounds like the formula for a pretty cool ghost story: A couple and their ten year old twin daughters move to a strange old house in New England after the father, a pilot, is involved in a plane crash that kills 39 people. Tucked in the back of the basement is a strange door with 39 heavy bolts holding it shut. Meanwhile, the town is full of slightly odd people who don't seem to be telling the Linton's everything they know. Dun dun duuuuuun!

Sadly, it's all downhill from there.

The short version: A plot that crawls along following two completely different premises when the book would have been far better embracing one or the other, characters who are too obvious in their intentions and protagonists who are too oblivious, and an annoying use of second-person narration (for almost no real payoff).

The biggest problem here is that the plot doesn't actually follow anything remotely resembling what was promised. The creepy door that just so happens to have 39 bolts holding it shut--you know, just like the number of people who died in the plane crash that Chip Linton was flying?--has almost no bearing on the story. Oh, there are bones behind it, sure, but those don't actually have any bearing on the story. All of the action in the story would have happened exactly the same way, even without the door. Never mind that the door is literally the first thing we're introduced to in the book--it's the first and last thing mentioned in the prologue. Never mind that the door is mentioned twice on the dust jacket.

Instead, we get three ghosts, none of which are related to the house, and only two of which are of any import to the story. But, okay, we can work with that, right? Ghosts are ghosts, even if they don't have anything to do with the door. They're victims of the plane crash, and papa ghost wants a playmate for his daughter, because he's so angry that she was taken from the world too soon. Bonus points to the author for keeping us in suspense about whether the ghosts are real or just figments of Chip's disturbed imagination. Points subtracted for having the third ghost not actually do anything after her initial appearance. Still, that could have been fine, except that Bohjalian decided that wasn't enough. We need something... more.

So, the ghosts aren't enough, what about creepy townspeople? It's not enough to tie them in to the creepy history of the house or to have them know details about it that the Linton's don't. Oh, no, we need something more. Instead, they're a bunch of herbalist witches who want to do horrible things to the twins, because they're evil witches. A fact that's obvious almost from the moment we meet them, but that the Lintons are apparently too stupid to notice. Chip I can mostly give a pass to, since he's suffering from PTSD (a fact that you're reminded of every two pages) from the plane crash, but both Chip and Emily mention, several times, how weird people are around their kids, and yet they do nothing but wander around aimlessly for 300 pages. Even when the people who seem to know things start dropping dead and going missing, it never occurs to these people that anything is seriously screwy?

So, okay, we've got ghosts from a plane crash, but one of the ghosts doesn't matter; we've got a bunch of evil witches who want to hurt the Linton's daughters but are pretending to be friendly; we've got a creepy door that doesn't actually play any part in the plot. Great. Frankly, either story line would have been a fine story, I think. The witch story line is very Stepford Wives, but with a twist. It's Whole Foods meets Stepford Wives (whoever wants that idea? Run with it; I give it to you freely!). The ghost story would be fine, too; are they in his head? Are they actually ghosts? What do they want from him? What will he do? Together, they're just a mess.



The plot problems are bad enough, but the writing didn't grab me, either. The use of the second person for the pilot was beyond annoying. I get why it was done, but the payoff at the end wasn't worth it. Maybe it's just me, but I find second person narratives really annoying. I'm not the pilot, and I wouldn't act the way he does. If you tell me that I notice my weird older neighbors acting like creepers towards my twin daughters, my reaction is to become paternal and protect them, not to shrug apathetically and wander off staring at the ceiling.

And don't even get me started on the conclusion. To call it "unsatisfying" is an understatement.

Ultimately, this tries to be too many things at once and doesn't achieve any of them well. I wish that Behjalian had written the book promised on the jacket, instead.




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