Review: White Space

Book one of the Dark Passages
By Ilsa J. Bick
Available now from EgmontUSA
Review copy

WHITE SPACE does not have a quick beginning.  It opens with Lizzie, a precocious child, observing a conflict between her parents play out.  This bit is filled with odd vocabulary and a strange magic, and just as soon as you think you've figured out the rules, a girl named Emma wakes up from her reverie about being Lizzie to recall how she came to be driving through the mountains.  And so on, flashing though narrators and their stories and the way they come together.

WHITE SPACE is a disorienting experience.  It keeps almost coming together into something nice and neat when Ilsa J. Bick throws another curveball in the story's rules.  This wouldn't work for most books, but WHITE SPACE is a horror novel.  The shifts in the text keep the readers as off balance as the characters.  Plus, it is metafictional horror.  The characters are, in many ways, threatened by potential monsters fueled by their own fears.  The deceptive looseness of the structure makes the amorphous more frightening.

I was thrilled by WHITE SPACE.  This is a disturbing book, full of imagery that gets beneath your skin, like a shirt wearing a person or crawling through tunnels (filled with things I'll leave to you to discover).  It's a book that trusts the reader's intelligence, to remember the details and fit them together, to be able to readjust whenever there is a paradigm shift.  It's also populated with strangely likeable characters for a horror novel.

I will say that WHITE SPACE goes on a touch too long.  It's the beginning of a series, and stands fairly well on its own, although the ending chapters clearly lead-in to the next book.  But there is a bit of fatigue before then, because this is one fat novel.  I loved the rising tension of the opening, things ever so slightly not right.  But once things go crazy, a few incidents could've been cut.  At the same time, that's really my only complaint.  This is a genuinely scary horror novel, which is something I appreciate.

Review: The Sin Eater's Confession

By Ilsa J. Bick
Available now from Carolrhoda LAB (Lerner)
Review copy

When local football player Del dies, Ben volunteers to help his family around the farm and eventually takes a job there.  He takes Del's little brother Jimmy under his wing, but things change when Jimmy places second in a national photography contest.  One of the photos is a sexually charged image of Ben that fuels much gossip and speculation in their small town of Merit, Wisconsin.

You know where Ben ends up from the beginning.  THE SIN EATER'S CONFESSION is framed by Ben in Afghanistan, serving as a Medic, and writing a letter explaining what he knows about Jimmy, then deciding who to send it to.  They mystery is what happened to Jimmy, and not even Ben knows the whole story, though he probably knows more than most.

THE SIN EATER'S CONFESSION reminded me strongly of WHAT HAPPENED TO LANI GARVER and ABSOLUTE BRIGHTNESS.  It felt regressive at times, given how bigoted and unaccepting the people of Merit are.  But the novel makes a valid point in the novel that not every town is progressive, and right now being born somewhere where being gay is okay is still a matter of good luck.

The strengths of THE SIN EATER'S CONFESSION lie in Ben's voice and the ambiguity of people and events.  Ben is profoundly affected by people making assumptions about him, so he tries to refrain from making assumptions about others.  (He's also pretty clueless about when people are obviously into him.)  At the same time, he has his own prejudices that color his perceptions.  Although sometimes he is clearly right, because Jimmy's dad is a piece of work.

The main weakness is that the plot gets increasingly preposterous as the story goes on.  By the end of THE SIN EATER'S CONFESSION, Ben has done so many bone-headed things that it's amazing he's still alive and not in jail to enlist.  I don't want to refer to enlisting as a bone-headed thing.  Ilsa J. Bick is pretty fair about the pros and cons of the armed forces and why people might choose to enlist during a time of war.  But by the end of THE SIN EATER'S CONFESSION, I was having trouble suspending my disbelief.

This is the first book I've read by Ilsa J. Bick, though I know her Ashes books are very popular.  The end notes state that this is the first book she sold, and so I do feel a little as if I should approach THE SIN EATER'S CONFESSION as a debut work as well as a novel by an established writer.  It's got a great voice and raises some interesting questions, but it's pretty messy.  Recommended for fans of unsolved mysteries and LGBTQ themes.