Three Years with the Rat by Jay Hosking

First published in Canada in 2016; published by St. Martin's Press/Thomas Dunne Books on January 24, 2017

Scruffy has been grieving the loss of John and Grace, causing him to enter a depressive self-destructive state, much to the consternation of everyone who knows him, particularly Nicole, his former girlfriend. Scruffy probably has a real name, but if Jay Hosking revealed it, I missed it. Scruffy calls Nicole Trouble and Nicole calls him Danger, but most of his friends seem to call him Scruffy if they use his name at all. Maybe the absence of an identity is meant to symbolize the illusory nature of reality that is (I think) the story’s point.

John was Scruffy’s good friend and Grace is Scruffy’s sister. Grace has been missing since 2006, although there have been some sporadic Grace sightings since then. John, after trying to harm himself, spent some time in a psychiatric hospital. Immediately after his discharge in 2007, he starts building a box. In 2008, John is also gone, and it falls to Grace’s brother to remove the box from their apartment. He also adopts Buddy, John’s lab rat.

There are mirrors on the walls inside the box and … well … other things. Scruffy reassembles the box and enters it. The experience is unpleasant. Eventually Scruffy’s life becomes unpleasant, or at least odd, as he enters a reality in which memory of his existence fades away.

The story bounces around in time, which seems appropriate since time plays a key role in the story. Grace and John were researching the difference between objective and subjective time. Once Scruffy starts messing around with their experiment in an attempt to rescue John and Grace, he finds himself in a reality that differs from the one he remembers.

Even if the shifting time frames sort of make sense in the framework of the story, the technique is usually used to bring different timelines together in a way that slowly reveals whatever the author has been concealing from the reader. Sometimes the technique works well, but in this story it contributes little more than confusion. The hidden fact (what happened to John and Grace?) could have been revealed with just as much impact, and probably more suspense, if the story had been told in a linear fashion.

Eventually — and it takes too long to happen — the novel morphs into a horror story melded with a science fiction story. It is an imperfect meld because the horror isn’t frightening and the science fiction builds rather unscientifically on concepts that been around for decades.

That doesn’t mean Three Years With the Rat doesn’t have entertainment value, but the slow development doesn’t lead to the big payoff that justifies investing so much time to get there. I found myself asking “But why?” at several places in the climactic scene, and never quite puzzled out the answer. Fortunately, Hosking writes smoothly and his agreeable prose style offsets some of the novel’s weaknesses. Still, I can only give Three Years with the Rat a qualified recommendation because too much of it makes too little sense.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS