Whisper House Press

Title: Horror Movie

Release Date: June 11, 2024

Author: Paul Tremblay

Narrated by: Ari Fliakos, Dani Martineck, Micky Shiloah, Michael Crouch, Frankie Corzo, Stacy Gonzalez, Tyla Collier, Ariel Blake, Johnathan McClain, Dan Bittner, Eva Kaminsky, Gisela Chipe

Publisher: William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins

Horror Movie is a physical as well as ephemeral work of literature. Its shape is part of the story; the medium is part of the message, and it is self-critical and self-aware, containing as well a self-aware story-within-a-story. What do we call that? Postmodern? Post postmodern? I’m not sure. And the truth is, I nearly didn’t read this book. I had an advance reader copy, for which I was grateful at the time, but I quickly found that the layout in my Kindle was a no-go, and I literally could not read the book given the physically structural elements of the storytelling. So I waited. When the audiobook was released, I grabbed that via Libby and had at it. Five days later, I’m glad I waited and returned to the effort.

The first thing I noticed in the audiobook, in addition to knowing something of what I was getting into with the narrative structure, was the large cast of readers / performers—twelve of them. The last time I came across a large cast for an audiobook was for World War Z (Max Brooks, 2006), an audiobook experience that you’re a fool if you’ve not heard. Getting into this book on tape, I worried that the complexity of the storytelling combined with its cast of characters would render tracking the book overly challenging for my ADHD brain, but surprisingly, I did better with this book than with many others. (I usually restart audiobooks three or even five times in the first hour of narration before I can catch all the main players and the key setup, but this time I got it on the first take. Shocking!) This cast themselves played key roles in keeping my focus and telling the story Tremblay has written.

And Tremblay has outdone himself, I think, with Horror Movie. After Cabin at the End of the World and The Pallbearers Club, I didn’t quite know what I was getting into, but I knew it would be different. And different it was. In this story, again, Tremblay is a magician weaving what we’ve heard Stephen King describe as “uniquely portable” spells. Horror Movie is the narration by a key player in an aborted film from the 90s getting its 2020-something reboot. As the tale unspools in jumps from past to present to near-past, we get just enough of what we need to keep listening—as we get dribs of the sensational beats of this story, we need to know more. Even as Tremblay’s narrators put the cruelty of people entertained by gore and awfulness on display, we ourselves can’t help but to become those low curiosity-seekers. By the time we’re hit with the story’s climax, we’re all in, and we can’t turn away. Tremblay has us by the gums, and he knows we’d look at a blank screen if it held the promise of eventually offering more information, more dread. And we listen, or we read, or we stare—into the abyss, and into Tremblay’s Orb of Palantir. Will we see ourselves? Some of us might.

I heartily recommend Tremblay’s latest effort. Five stars.