Synopsis
Ten people head out on a backpacking trip, but the first night eleven set up camp. Everyone remembers everyone else. Who is the extra?
“The Extra is exceptional in every way: Extra unnerving, extra eerie, extra tense. Annie Neugebauer pedals in the same alpine paranoia as John Carpenter’s classic The Thing, manifesting a sense of dissociative anxiety that only mounts with every turn of the page.” – Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
Review
As always, my endless thanks to Shortwave Media for the physical ARC. Another unique cover with great colors!
A group of 7 students, 2 group leads, and 1 director head into the woods for a backpacking trip. 10 people. So how the hell do they set up camp on the first night with 11 total? Something is clearly wrong, but they all seem to remember each other like there isn’t an extra. Those in charge even remember everyone from the pre-trip dinner, but how could that be possible?
This is an incredibly simple, creepy, eerie premise. It’s also short, so it had to be all about atmosphere. Which can be quite hard to capture in so short a time. This is where I originally struggled personally. I was creeped out, and my brain was screaming “alien” but I didn’t necessarily feel that creeping unease. Truthfully, I did get really sick during the reading of this one, which prolonged the time it took to finish, so that could honestly be on me. The one singular thing that I still struggle with though is the author harping on them using a 10-seat passenger van. I just found it odd that the main character needed to grasp that as his holy ground for knowing. Coming from the times of being a teen while only one friend drove, only smushing in a single other person doesn’t feel farfetched to me. Two smaller women or men sharing a backseat? That could easily have explained it, but the author had the main character take the 10 seats as confirmation. And maybe there’s a point to that that I am simply missing, but I feel like a well placed sentence explaining it away would have helped. As the instructor, is he such a stickler for safety and rules that he’d never seat an extra person perhaps?
I also wouldn’t have said no to another 30 pages or so. I feel like we get snippets of the students, but not all of them, and maybe not necessarily deep enough to have a decision be made on who the extra was. And maybe with his prying, one of them would have thought to ask “why are you asking this?…I was talking with so and so and they said you asked them that too…” and that would have added a layer of tension more to the atmosphere. But again, perhaps that is the point—the author’s subversion, or even perversion, of expectations.
Mildly spoilery (but also not) below:
Now the real surprise for me comes from the ending. At first, I thought it was okay but rather simple. Now, NOW I can’t stop freaking thinking about it. They said only ten of them are leaving the woods no matter what, that was the decision. Who in their right mind (especially because they clearly aren’t) could make that call? How would you live with it, not knowing if you were really right or not? Did you do the right thing, or did you condemn the world, unleashing something that was never meant to leave those woods? Oh my god, I seriously can’t get it out of my head, and therefore, it’s continually grown on me. There’s no answers here, no comforting end. If you can’t trust your own mind, your memories, what else can’t you trust? Can’t we trust?
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