Review: Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones

Rating: 7.75/10

Synopsis

The New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones, brings readers a spine-tingling journey through a young boy’s haunted home. Winner of the 2017 Bram Stoker Award for Long Fiction!

“A triumph. So emotionally raw, disturbing, creepy, and brilliant.”
—Paul Tremblay, New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie

Walking through his own house at night, a young boy thinks he sees another person stepping through a doorway. The figure reminds him of his long-dead father, who drowned mysteriously before his family left the reservation. When he follows, it he discovers his house is bigger and deeper than he ever knew. 

The house is the kind of wrong place where you can lose yourself and find things you’d rather not have. Over the course of a few nights, the boy tries to map out his house in an effort that puts his younger brother in the worst danger, and puts him in the position to save them . . . at a terrible cost.

“Brilliant.” —The New York Times

Review

Thanks to Tor Nightfire for a physical arc of this beautiful rerelease! 

And FYI, B&N is running some kind of $5 add-on for this right now!

A unique haunted house story unlike anything else I’ve read. Someone (or something) passing a doorway. A reflection caught out of the corner of the eye. A shadow where there shouldn’t be. We’ve all heard or seen or read stories like these. But what Stephen Graham Jones is offering isn’t a boy haunted by the ghost he thinks he’s seen, but a boy encouraging the ghost it could have been. 

After the death of his father, his mother moved him and his brother away from the reservation. But if his father died elsewhere, how could he find them here? Is his father returning to save him? His brother? To make his mother less lonely? To make them whole again? He certainly thinks so, and will waste away the nights just praying for another glimpse of his hero. 

As much as this story is gut wrenching, it’s also about the boy’s hope, and regardless of whether or not that can be perceived as naive, that’s what hit me so strongly in this one. A novelette length examination on the lengths in which hope can bind us to the past, to the need of a father, to the almost vampiric nature of holding on.