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?
Review
When I chaperoned my kid’s field trip to a nature reserve last year that were multiple checkpoints to take attendance before departing both the school and the park to make sure everyone was accounted for. I mention this because it was the predominant thought that sprung to mind while listening to Annie Neugebauer’s The Extra, narrated by Sean Patrick Hopkins.
Matt is our lead POV through the supernatural crisis that arises and is responsible for taking a small group of college students on a class hiking and camping trip through the woods several states away from their native Texas. Matt is a stickler for the rules and has written an entire guidebook for his two student-employees to follow. The van they take seats ten, and by god, there will be only ten people seated, even if room could be made for an extra two or three bodies, but it can’t, it won’t, not under Matt’s watch, by god.
Upon arriving at the site of their trip, the group is almost immediately set upon when a strange electrical surge knocks out their headlamps. Not long after, Matt notices something odd – their party of ten has increased by one. Somehow, there’s an extra person among them, but he can’t figure out who it is because he has memories of each of them, which could only have been planted in his mind by whoever – or whatever – this mysterious anomaly is.
And here is where I began wondering why the hell this strict rule-follower who is taking a group of college kids into the woods doesn’t have an attendance sheet. He doesn’t do roll-call, or have people sign in, or sign liability waivers for this excursion into the woods so far from home? We know these students had to register and pay for all this, so where’s the paperwork, Matt? Matt, with all his rules, doesn’t, in this age of school shootings and government-sponsored abductions and human trafficking, do the most basic bare minimum task expected of a school excursion across state lines and make sure everyone is accounted for before taking them all off in a van for an hours long road-trip to the middle of nowhere?
I get why Neugebauer doesn’t. It’s the same reason cell phones never work in these types of stories (they don’t work here, either, of course, thanks to no cell signal in the forest). To have Matt take attendance upon being confronted by this extra person would be to make this already short novella even shorter.
I couldn’t get over this omission, nor the fact that it’s not even brought up as a suggestion by Matt’s student guides who help shepherd their 7, plus one, hikers along the trail. It festered and gnawed away at my enjoyment the whole way through. I’m not sure if the lack of an attendance sheet is a glaring omission, an inconvenience merely swept under the rug, or just laziness, but it really did irk me. Maybe if this story had been set in the 1970s or ‘80s, I could have given it a pass, but in this era of helicopter parenting and cellphone check-ins, it struck me as galling. Even if I were able to overlook the lack of roll call, I cannot overlook Matt’s collection of photographs of his student group pre-hike and why he didn’t just compare that against who is present around him now. Since the anomaly apparently can’t affect digital photos the way it can the human mind, or maybe doesn’t know about digital cameras, one might reasonably conclude it doesn’t know about attendance records either. But why doesn’t Matt? We know he’s a rule lover, a fact so baked into the narrative that each chapter is titled Rule #1, Rule #2, Rule #3, etc., etc., etc.
The Extra isn’t about logic, though, so much as it is about conveying a certain mood, an emotional response, and a paranoid vibe. The parable here is an exploration of just how easy it is to Other another, and then exile and dismiss them altogether for nebulous, if not imaginary, reasons. It calls into question who the real villain is and whether or not it’s the right thing to do given perceived threats in a given context. I couldn’t help but wonder what a story reframing the point of view would like here, if we saw things through the eyes of this stranger wondering why their hiking guide is acting so weird and worrying about being found out when all it wants to do is just blend in. Maybe that would be too straightforward of an analogy, though, for certain groups already so thoroughly victimized, vilified, and excluded.
While the premise is intriguing, the execution is too soft, too clean, too cozy. We never get a real sense of what this anomalous person is capable of beyond blending in and implanting false memories, but it doesn’t appear to pose any threat beyond just being an unexpected and unwanted person our narrator has to deal with, and god, who hasn’t been there before? There’s no violence, no bloodshed, no tension, no real sense of danger, no stakes at all beyond whatever the reader’s imagination might conjure on the author’s behalf. It’s horror for people who think mayonnaise is too spicy.
Neugebauer resists any easy answers to the predicament she sets forth, approaching the subject matter with abstruseness. I never could suss out exactly why we were supposed to feel so afraid of this extra or to consider them a potential danger and wondered exactly what the harm would be in letting this person on the bus home, beyond Matt’s apparent seating issues. Would allowing this extra a ride into civilization truly be the end of the world? If so, what’s the evidence of this? Is a false memory, even a good one, enough to condemn another being? For the amount of agonizing our narrator does over this extra, it all amounts to very little in the end. It’s a shame, because there is a neat concept at the core of this book and some cool ideas. They’re all just underbaked and never materialize into anything substantial, engaging, or even remotely horrifying. At least The Extra is short, and Hopkins’ narration is powerful and attention-holding, so it has that going for it, if nothing else.
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