Customer Reviews

Ordinary Horror

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

I found "Ordinary Horror" compelling at the outset. It draws the reader in immediately with a terrific first paragraph, vivid imagery, and a story that suggests an ominous, cynical adaptation of "Little Shop of Horrors." The first third of the novel reads well, has an unusual, well-drawn protagonist, and moves along at slow but tantalizing pace. I did not want to put it down.

By the middle of the book I could not stop putting it down. Every chapter seemed like a challenge to finish, for the simple reason that Searcy never tightens the story's early sensation of creepy uneasiness. Instead he just draws it out, until every ominous symbol becomes watery-thin. It becomes boring, which is terribly unfortunate given the promising start. The book jacket promises a riveting climax as the payoff, but I found the finale confusing and artificial, tacked-on. There was no horror, no tension, no interest left for me at that point. Inertia alone led me to finish the novel.

Searcy is a fine prose stylist, and much of the imagery in "Ordinary Horror" is memorably vivid. But there's too much of it, and too little emotion. One of the reviewers -- I think it was Russell Hoban -- compared him to Borges, and I think the comparison is valid. But Borges was a brilliant editor as well as an ingenious storyteller, which is why almost every story he published was less than 15 pages long. Had Searcy applied the same level of intensity to his own rewriting, "Ordinary Horror" might have been something special. Instead, it is a messy first novel by a gifted author. Despite my criticism, I look forward to reading Searcy's next book.

I think the FBI needs to investigate David Searcy. His book, Ordinary Horror, is obviously an encoded message, intended for Russian Intelligence. A message that I certainly was unable to decipher.

To his credit, the author has a wonderful command of the English language. He describes simple, even mundane, objects and events with such vivid detail, you form a stunningly clear image of what's going on. You can really feel the emotions of the characters and understand their experiences. However, the author never takes the story beyond a series of excruciatingly detailed observations, and the detail finally becomes overwhelming.

At the start, the story seems to hold so much promise -- a mysterious plant that wreaks havoc on it's owner and his neighbors. But, the author quickly swerves away from this plot and never really explores any of the wonderful possibilities that it holds. Disparate elements of the plot are thrown at the reader throughout the book, but in the end are never explained and never tied together. Just as you think things might be starting to come together, the story slams into yet another dead end. Another red herring -- you realize that the agonizing discourse on Amazonian biotoxins that you just trudged through leads the story nowhere -- in fact has nothing at all to do with the outcome.

The cover jacket promises: "As incidents of 'ordinary horror' multiply, Searcy's extraordinary tale gradually builds to an apocalyptic -- and unforgettable -- climax." Unfortunately, the story builds and builds, but never reaches the promised climax. As I turned the last page and finished the last paragraph, I remained hopeful that something brilliant would rise from everything that had been constructed up to that point. In the end, I was just left asking: "what was the point?".

I'm surprised nobody has reached the same conclusion as myself.
The plants were an opiate, an hallucinogenic... they had the neighbours and Frank stoned out of their minds for months. The effects were like LSD, where Mr Delabano found himself losing hours at a time staring at minute details, hence the narratives long, ponderous attention to the explicit details. It is why he couldn't recognise a dead animal, or Janie at the window. It also mirrors the outline of the book he has on Amazonian botany which features similarly pointless stories - and similarly pointless photos of seamingly nondescript pathways which are labelled 'luminesence'. The authors were clearly exposed to the same plant. Hence the title Ordinary Horror. Ther horror was not lurking within some monster, it was in the tedium of suburban life as highlighted and drawn into focus by the effects of the plants. ie. the sisters fixed to the TV. The horror....the horror.

The wildly divergent reviews of this author's work make one thing very clear: This is high quality writing which doesn't leave anybody unaffected. Literary horror is a very different beast than "regular" horror writing. This book isn't meant to be a fast-paced thriller in the Stephen King tradition. It isn't meant to be read at a breakneck pace. Readers who come to it expecting that will likely be disappointed (thus the negative reviews), but those who read with open minds will find new levels of horror and lovely, provocative writing.

This book is evocative, elegant, contemplative, and does a wonderful job of pointing out the menacing aspects of mundane suburban life--the things most people don't notice, but which suddenly take on scary aspects when viewed more closely.

What do we really know about our world? Are we sure about that? One small misstep, taken for innocent reasons, might just set off a chain of slowly building, innocuous-seeming events which lead to eventual destruction. Once that chain of events takes hold, how long will it take for others to notice? This isn't a horror story to wash over us while we sit idle. It's one with which we must engage and participate.

Give this book a chance. Stretch your own thinking, and you'll be rewarded.

David Searcy, Ordinary Horror (Viking, 2001)

What to say about Ordinary Horror? A number of reviews have already said most of it. The book is derivative (most notably of Ramsey Campbell), with a pace that is an insult to pedestrians, and seems to have been vastly mismarketed by Viking, though one can't well blame that on Searcy. To call Ordinary Horror a horror novel would be to call A. M. Homes' Music for Torching (with which this book has a good deal in common, though Music for Torching is better-paced and is, at least, about something) a horror novel; it just don't work.

So then why did I end up giving it a (slightly) above average rating? Because of Searcy's use of language. The book is readable in the same way Joyce Carol Oates' books are readable; the language is so thick and tangled that at times it's impossible to sort out what's going on, but most of the time, you're too busy wallowing in the language to really care. That can be enough of a reason to read a book, and somewhat unfortunately, in this case it has to be.

Frank Delabano is a man living alone in his seventies. He has problems with gophers in his rose garden, so he orders a plant called Gopherbane to get rid of them. Once he plants them and they bloom, things start to go a little odd in the neighborhood.

There's a great premise here (in fact,t here's more than one great premise), but it seems as if the premises themselves end up being red herrings for Searcy's Homes-like satire on suburban life in America at the end of the twentieth century. There's real promise here, especially in the way Delabano's interactions change with his neighbors over the course of the book, but everything's left hanging at the end-- it's not a few loose ends, the end of the book is one massive loose end. Still, if you allow yourself to get carried away by the language, you may end up not caring too much. ***

I started this short book with high hopes as I'd read some glowing reviews of it. The first few pages were well-written and promised an eerie story that would creep up on the reader. However, by the time I got a third of the way through the book I became increasingly aggravated with the obliqueness, lack of affect of the protagonist, and minimal plot. Halfway through I just wanted to skip to the end and find out if ANYTHING happened. Basically, Ordinary Horror would have made a pretty good short story but is an extraordinarily dull novel.

i agree with the prior reviewers that the story starts with promise. an elderly widower orders a strange plant to help rid his garden of gophers, and what starts as a promising story of the strange effect of these plants on the neighborhood (or is it all in his mind?)soon turns into a story full of the beginnings of menace and horror which NEVER pay off. i kept waiting for something happen and nothing ever did. save your money....my copy of this book ended up in a trashcan @ the airport.

Hmm. This book purports to be a thriller and for a while it manages. An old man with a gopher problem buys some mysterious plants from a newspaper ad that claim to be "antithetical to garden varmints but harmless to everything else". Then mysteriously all the pets disappear from the neighborhood and both the old man and the little girl next door have an unshakeable feeling of impending doom.

Alright, that's fine for a start. The problem is, that's about three quarters of the book right there. The style is so SLOW. It's not slow meaning boring. But it kept taking so long for anything to happen. It drove me nuts!! For example, the little girl calls the old man in the middle of the night and asks him to come over because "the dog in her room is moving". (The impending doom was explained to the girl as "a very bad dog." It was creepy.) So the old man says he'll come over in the morning. Then the next day he spends pages and pages flipping through old photographs of his wife! Not going over to the neighbours' to progress the story line.

The whole book is like that. If it had been told concisely it would be a novella and one quarter the size it is now. As it is, it is slow and frustrating and ultimately comes to no kind of resolution anyway. Very frustrating.

From the first page I suspected 'Ordinary Horror' would, at most, live up to its title, and was certain it would never be extraordinary. For a novel that could easily have been a compelling drama, focusing on ordinary horrors like memory loss and old age, and WORKED, it did an amazingly bad job of being scary. The killer plants are perhaps the smallest of subplots in comparison to the other, more mudane problems our forgetful old friend is faced with- like dealing with creepy neighbors (we ALL have some of those) and pondering what dead animal lies rotting in the road. If you have to start skimming before the halfway point, you know you have a problem. The last thing I remember reading was (I think?) Delabano climbing up onto a rooftop to gaze at the sun hitting the snowy rooftops. A year later I discovered the book in my closet, and on the way to donate it to the library, I read the last page- apparently his garden goes up in flames, along with his buffoonish neighbor. Wow. What a stellar ending.

For a book categorized as a horror novel, theres little action here. Mostly the book is a third-person narrator putting us inside the head of seventy-year-old widower Frank Delabano whose life consists of trying to isolate himself from his neighbors and who finds refuge in his roses, which are for him a sort of redolent drug, an intoxicant that he associates with serenity and safety. The roses have an underside or a demonic side as well, for they are not real. They represent the artificial kind of sanctuary we find when were cut off from the human race. In many ways, then, Delabano is a picture of Dead Suburban Man who, unable and unwilling to connect with society, immerses himself in the false comforts of suburban life.

In many ways Ordinary Horror is a long essay or critique of suburbia disguised as a horror novel. Apart from the novels slow pace, which gets bogged down, especially when we must go over lengthy expositions on horticulture, this approach works, showing us, like David Lynchs film Blue Velvet, the hideous malaise that afflicts those of us who isolate ourselves in suburbia and infatuate ourselves with our own mythology of innocence.

If you like the theme of Modern Man Dying in the Suburbs, you might want to take a look at Thomas Bergers classic and funny novel Neighbors, which showcases Earl Keese, a spiritual cousin of Frank Delabano.