Review: The Extra by Annie Neugebauer

Rating: 7/10

Ten people head out on a backpacking trip, but the first night eleven set up camp. Everyone remembers everyone else. Who is the extra?

There’s often joy to be found in the unexpected. An extra McNugget in your happy meal, a little left over from rent, so you can treat yourself to a book or three. Neugebauer’s upcoming novella “The Extra,” (out September 9th from Shortwave) is a short, sharp, subversion of exactly that notion. There are contexts in which having extra is bad. Very very bad. An unwelcome gift. A sinister surplus if you will. Imbued with a concentrated sense of unease from the very first headcount, “The Extra,” is something I imagine readers will tear through in one sitting with sweaty palms and a pounding heart. The very definition of simple but effective, Neuegebauer creates an atmosphere so thick that you could slice into it, and ensures that you remain just as clueless as the protagonists throughout and beyond. I will now be hanging up the hiking boots I never had and will remain in bed reading and reviewing for the foreseeable future. 

We follow Matt, who every year, along with two student leaders, this time, Joey and Bianca, leads a group of 7 into rural Arkansas. Crucially, this amounts to 10 people. 10. The same number that get out of the van. By the time the group make it to camp the first night, they have gained an extra. You’d think that the straggler could be weeded out easily enough, a face out of place, a name nobody remembers, but Matt can place each and every one of the eight of them, as can Joey and Bianca. Nobody has the foggiest idea what is going on, but what is clear is that whatever entity has infiltrated the group can not come home with them.

“The Extra,” is a straightforward idea that is executed with quite some flair. Frankly, readers should not expect much by way of character development or even any answers. Neugebauer declines to offer such comforts. What you are in store for should you pick up “The Extra,” however, is a chilling concept that will get under, or perhaps into, your skin, and an ending with a nasty twist that will leave you open-mouthed and scratching your head and perhaps rocking yourself gently back and forth, Paul Tremblay style. In “The Extra,” Neugebauer’s brand of horror is precise and effective, unnerving from the get go, and causing the hairlines of readers to recede further in less than 100 pages.

For me though, the greatest horror lurking within the (very high quality Shortwave) pages of “The Extra,” is the existentialism. Self-doubt slowly eating away at the foundations of our realities. The compulsion to check and double check things we think we know to be true. We’re dragged into a spiral in which our memories are no longer simply fallible but quite literally engineered. In this novella the ultimate violation is not of the body but of the mind, and that makes it a hell of a lot scarier. 

There are but two emotions one encounters whilst reading “The Extra,” those being stress and confusion. In case you’re new around here, that’s a ringing endorsement. Curtois’ “The Laws of The Skies,” meets “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” in this minimalist but fucking terrifying sci-fi horror mystery. I wasn’t planning on making the trip anyhow, but you will not be catching me in Arkansas anytime soon for the only extra I’m welcoming is an extra hour’s sleep.