Matt Marinovich

Possibly the worst thing ever written, certainly the worst thing I've ever read. Wish I had never forced myself to finish; I only did so because the intensely horrible part didn't get out of hand until far into the book. I should have just stopped instead of contiinuing simply for the sake of not wanting to admit I'd wasted time to read to that point. I am only posting this book on my list here in hopes that this review will keep others from making the mistake of reading this awful, inexcusable, sick mess.… (mere)

It is the winter and the Hamptons are empty - anyone that has another home is back home; just the locals are still around. And one of them is Victor - a dying man who had been just admitted into the hospital while his daughter Elise and her husband Scott are staying at his house and visiting him in the hospital. It does sound like a sad but normal picture, doesn't it? Turned out that it is not.

So let's try a few questions:
1. You find an empty house next door while exploring the area. What would you do?
a) Go home - you are a grown up after al
b) Find a way to get into the house

2. After you went into the house and tell your wife, what would you two do next?
a) Decide to stop behaving like 10 years olds
b) Go to the house and have sex in it

3. If you find a bed covered in blood in the house, what would you do?
a) Call the police
b) Decide that you may want to blackmail the home owners.

If you answered with a) to all of the questions, you are thinking clearly. If you answered with b) on all of them, you are probably Scott - the protagonist and narrator of this novel. And those will be some of your best decisions in the next few months - because Scott makes more and more bad choices.

Victor comes home to die and between that and the house next door, some old secrets start poking their heads up. The story twists and twists and everything needs to be reevaluated based on all the new information (except the evaluation of Scott. He remains an idiot to the end). Murders, sexual assaults, past crimes, present crimes, a brother that seems to be just a phone call away and a big reveal at the end that was so clumsily foreshadowed that it would have been surprising if Marinovich had not gone there.

Add to this some clumsy writing, including one of the worst sex scenes I had read in a while ("her cold thighs pressed tight around my warm ears" being just a part of the mercifully short scene) and the novel leaves you with a "so what?" feeling. The threads of the plot get tied off - we learn all about the house and the blood and so on but something just does not work very well. what is worse is that it could have worked - the setting and the start are serviceable - it just gets downhill fast. At least it was short.… (mere)