This book was kind of a mess. It was intriguing enough to keep me going to the end, but after it was over, my only thought was, "well, that's over". It had so many good reviews that I wanted to like it, but even with a generously open mind, I found it mostly annoying. 

The problem, for me, is it didn't know what kind of story it wanted to be. A well-researched,  fictional accounting of true historical events and real historical characters? A ghost story? A mystery? A romance? An unreliable narrator with a disturbed mind? I think it could have been any of these things, and done it well, if the author had just committed to a couple of these concepts. But she tried to do it all, and it just didn't work for me. I spent most of the time wondering what the heck was going on, and not in a good way. Extraordinary amounts of time were spent on characters who weren't central to the story. The narrative continually jumped between characters and tense and timelines. 

I'm rating it three stars, because for all its flaws it kept me interested and sort of entertained. Maybe this would have been better in a text version, although I felt Jane Collingwood gave an excellent performance as narrator. 

Audiobook, via Audible. 

This book is just all over the place. The combination of timeline-jumping and character-jumping and retrospectives during the character-jumping leave you with no coherent narrative to follow. A few of the characters are at least mildly interesting, so I'll keep soldiering along, but if things don't start settling down and coming together and telling a single story, I'm out of here. 

This anthology has been the perfect palate-cleanser between books for me. None of the stories are more than a few pages long, and it's a fun mix of classic and modern authors, with very few duds so far. I just finished stories by Henry Slesar, Richard Chizmar, Avram Davidson, and Gary Raisor. Chizmar is the only one I'd even heard of. 

Of the four novellas in this collection, the title story is unquestionably the best, and not only because we get to spend more time with Holly Gibney from the The Outsider and the Mr. Mercedes series. It's probably the most complete of the stories.  Mr. Harrigan's Phone and The Life of Chuck were classic SK "what if" games for the imagination. The last one, Rat, was not his strongest, but another "being a writer is hard" navel gazer mixed with Faust.

Audiobook via Audible, read by Will Patton, Danny Burstein, and Steven Weber. All do a fine job, but I was delighted to have Patton back and voicing Holly again. 

"I love you, Mom," Holly says and ends the call. Is that true? Yes. It's liking that got lost, and love without liking is like a chain with a manacle at each end. 

 

Oh how this struck me. It is so painfully true.