The Mansion by Ezekiel Boone

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on December 4, 2018

The Mansion is a horror novel that faintly echoes The Shining, in that the action takes place in an older multiple-room building occupied in its winter months by a husband and wife that, come spring, will be placed in the service of guests. The story is also similar in that the protagonist struggles with his sanity — perhaps he was a bit unhinged before beginning his stay; perhaps his perceptions are altered by the environment in which he dwells. In most respects, however, The Mansion and The Shining are quite different.

Billy Stafford and Shawn Eagle developed a new kind of smartphone operating system by working intensely in a cabin near a dilapidated mansion in the woods for 23 months. A third fellow who joined them, Takata, they try not to think about. Billy didn’t think about much of anything except drugs and booze after Shawn stole the company from him. Billy won Emily, the woman they both wanted, but Shawn became one of the richest men in the world, leaving Billy with a small amount of stock that he sold to support his addictions.

Years earlier, Shawn’s parents died in a fire on the property where the mansion sat. It has always had a reputation for being haunted. Shawn is rennovating to create a retreat for the ultra-wealthy, but construction accidents have only added to the legend of the haunted mansion.

Shawn has equipped the mansion with a program called Nellie that he and Billy imagined but never made a reality. Billy wrote most of the code; Shawn’s engineers tried to plug the gaps. Nellie is not quite an Artificial Intelligence, but it is meant to anticipate needs and to take action, without being prompted, to make its users happy. Shawn wants Nellie to run the mansion but there’s a ghost in the machine and Shawn needs Billy to perform an exorcism. Nellie, it seems, has a temper.

The final plot element involves Emily’s sister Beth, her husband Rothko, and their spooky twin daughters. That’s the only plot element that didn’t work for me. At some point, enough is enough and more is too much. The twins play a significant role in the story but they don’t fit snugly into the concept and their presence is just too convenient. Eziekiel Boone could have told the story without them and their omission would have improved the novel’s focus. The science fiction rule that it's fine to imagine one, but only one, impossible thing should also bind horror writers.

Despite my sense that The Mansion is an inspired amalgamation of two or three Stephen King plots, it stands comfortably on its own merits. Horror succeeds when it’s convincing. Apart from the bewitched twins, Boone does a masterful job of placing real people in real danger. Even if the danger is combination of supernatural forces and a computer gone mad, Boone does what good horror writers do — he makes the reader forget how divorced from reality the story’s premise might be so that the reader can worry about Billy and Emily and experience vicarious fear. The novel has a good pace, develops sympathetic characters in a reasonable amount of detail, and works its way to a satisfying climax.

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Skitter by Ezekiel Boone

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on May 2, 2017

I read Skitter without realizing that it is the second novel in a series, following on the heels of The Hatching. Maybe I should pay more attention to book descriptions, but Skitter is quite easy to follow, even without reading the first novel. It cannot be read as a stand-alone novel, however, because it ends in mid-action, leaving the plot entirely unresolved.

Skitter starts as an amusing “the apocalypse is coming” story and morphs into an amusing “the apocalypse is here” story. The apocalypse involves an invasion of man-eating spiders. This is the kind of apocalyptic novel in which people respond to a crisis by engaging in ridiculous behavior. In other words, it seems realistic.

The president, Stephanie Pilgrim, needs to make some hard decisions about the spread of the spiders, but she has the support of presidential adviser Manny Walchuck, with whom she is cheating on her husband. She has less support from the military, with its inevitable “nuke ‘em” advice, but there are no easy choices.

At the NIH, Melanie Gruyer has become the most important woman in the world. She knows a lot about how spiders move, although she doesn’t know why millions of them have started eating people. Melanie is the novel’s touchstone of normalcy.

In quarantined Los Angeles, Bobby Higgs has set himself up as a prophet, ranting against the government and enforcing order with an army of thugs. Of course, his true agenda is to get out of LA before he’s eaten by spiders.

Mike Rich is an FBI agent in Minneapolis until the FBI abandons Minneapolis. He frets about keeping his daughter safe in an unsafe world. The spiders have made that more difficult.

A group of intelligent misfits think they have a solution to the spiders. Their idea needs some refinement, to say the least.

There are a bunch … and I mean a bunch … of other characters. Some die. Some survive, presumably to reappear in the next novel. One or two survive but probably wish they hadn’t … or they would if they were still capable of thinking like a human. Most of the action takes place in a decimated America but spiders are also a problem in Japan, Peru, Berlin, Oslo, and other places the reader at least briefly visits. Me, I’d grab a parka and head to Alaska in the hope that the spiders will become dormant in the permafrost.

There are some very funny background moments in Skitter, such as the description of a truck stop that is emblematic of Midwestern fast food Americana. But like many amusing novels, Skitter makes a serious point. The excrement may well hit the fan (the world seems to be moving in that direction, doesn’t it?), but it won’t be the nutty survivalists and preppers who save us, because (1) they only care about saving themselves and (2) you can’t plan for everything. Rational thought and a willingness to work together offer the best hope for enduring a crisis. Arming yourself with shotguns and nutrition bars and retreating to a shack in the woods won’t stop the spiders.

Since apocalyptic fiction is seriously overdone, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Skitter. The story isn’t particularly deep, but it isn’t shallow. It is populated by lively characters and it features a number of unexpected moments. It also left me wanting to read the first and the next book, all of which is enough to earn a recommendation.

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