The Unseen: Alexandra Sokoloff

I kicked off last year's RIP V with a Sokoloff too, her debut novel The Harrowing. I didn't like it. You can read the reasons why here. So it was a bit of an anomaly that I decided to go with another Sokoloff. I usually don't give authors multiple chances since there's too much to read without me trying to wade through what I don't like. But the premise of this one definitely caught my eye:

After experiencing a precognitive dream that shatters her engagement and changes her life forever, young California psychology professor Laurel MacDonald decides to make a fresh start by taking a job at Duke University in North Carolina. She soon becomes obsessed with the long-buried files from the world-famous Rhine parapsychology experiments, which attempted to prove whether extrasensory perception really exists.

Along with another professor, she uncovers disturbing reports, including a mysterious case of a house supposedly haunted by a poltergeist, investigated by an earlier research team in 1965. The two professors and two exceptionally gifted Duke students move into the grand, abandoned mansion to replicate the investigations, unaware that the entire original team ended up insane...or dead.

(This is from the UK cover, if you're wondering why there's such a heavy geographic emphasis on Duke. Either that or they underwrote the novel. I'm not convinced this isn't true.)

The story, based on the cover blurb, caught me for two reasons. The first is that I've always said I'm just one more strange experience away from owning my own emf reader. Parapsychology is fascinating to me, as is the legitimate study of the afterlife. The other reason the book caught my eye was because of its incredible similarity in concept to Shirley Hill's classic The Haunting of Hill House.

Because of my incredible love for The Haunting of Hill House, and my previous experience with Sokoloff, I wasn't expecting much. I wasn't expecting anything, actually, and figured this would be a scathing post on a Jackson wannabe book.

Surprise! I was wrong.

I'll start by saying that this wasn't a great book. It owes a hell of a lot to the Jackson, both in concept and to some degree in execution. It's no retelling, no modernization, and nothing would hold up in court (colloquially speaking), but the fact remains that The Unseen draws heavily from the Jackson. The Haunting of Hill House is the Stella McCartney, and The Unseen is the Topshop version. But even the Topshop versions can work.

A lot of my original complaints on The Harrowing hold here, though to a lesser degree. The book reads like the film adaptation was the purpose of the writing, and the plotting and characters fall into all of the tropes: the creepy house, the lurking crazies, the family secrets, and the one obligatory yet completely unimportant to the plot sex scene. The characters are stock, and the red herrings are red. There's nothing in The Unseen that is new or unusual.

Where it works, though, is that it's fun and yes, a little bit scary. I read it late into the night and experienced at least a moment or two of "oooo, lights out!" uneasiness when it was time to put the book down and sleep. It's a page-turner. It does suck you in, and it's an easy read. The tell-not-show ethos of The Harrowing is mostly gone here, the characters aren't nearly as obviously worked, and the setting and atmosphere can be downright crafty at times. The writing is much, much improved from The Harrowing, and the words and setting show this.

Is The Unseen a classic? Is it the sort of book that people are going to be reading years from now? Absolutely not. In fact, it's probably the sort of book that I'm going to forget about in a week or so. But unlike The Harrowing, which I read scoffing about every other line, The Unseen was actually fun to read and a little bit engrossing. Even if this is the sort of book that would make a better movie, it's still a book that gave me a couple of shivery, creepy hours. I'm certainly not asking for that time back.

And I'll definitely watch the film.