Synopsis
USA Today bestselling author David Niall Wilson’s When You Leave I Disappear is a literary horror novella in which a bestselling author’s imposter syndrome draws her into a darker and darker world from which she may never escape.
Review
The biggest thanks to Shortwave for sending an eARC my way!
When You Leave I Disappear is a powerhouse of a novella that demands attention and wonder. A prolonged gaze into the relationship between writer and fiction, David Niall Wilson pens a story, a story within a story, detailing the confrontation between creator and created. A wildly successful author suffers from imposter syndrome, leading to a series of writing exercises that turn into something else entirely. This is a maze of a novella that morphs in your own hands while reading, taking on darker tones of malevolence, yet shines through the intricacies of love. Love for craft, love for character, and love for connection. You see, it’s the things you don’t even realize that may just matter the most.
Before anything else, any analysis of themes or tropes or genres, When You Leave I Disappear is an utterly human story. For lack of a better adjective, this humanness is formed through this exploration of creative vulnerability from Wilson. Uncomfortableness is an inherent partner to vulnerability, existing in this yin and yang relationship that exhibits the truth of a matter, no matter how ugly. This novella is just that, a creative venture into the root of the human experience in the course of creation, the act of transforming illustrious thought or feeling into tangible words. And what are the ramifications of such a thing?
Most human of all, especially in today’s world, is the feeling of fraudulence manifested in what we know as imposter syndrome. A certain horror can be found in the vulnerabilities of creating when those creations aren’t up to par with the standards that we hold ourselves to. Again, very astutely, Wilson capitalizes on this minimized fear blown into a much larger proportion that results in a reckoning of sorts. When You Leave I Disappear breaks things down in a tragically gorgeous fashion through the story itself. This is metafiction at its finest that provokes thought, intrigue, and wonder surrounding this written word. It’s confounding until it’s not, the kind of story that best exemplifies the unending possibilities of its own existence.
In a succinct 134 pages, David Niall Wilson captures the complex, poetic nature of the artistic mind through the story itself. Other stories such as Stephen King’s The Dark Half and Philip Fracassi’s Gothic have brought the consciousness of writing to our minds before, but Wilson’s novella takes an almost lyrical approach to these ideas. If When You Leave I Disappear sounds confusing, it is for a while until the pieces fall into place and the heart of the matter is fully displayed. You may leave this novella with more questions than answers, but that’s okay. When You Leave I Disappear elicits raw emotion from the creative soul, conjuring the radiance of human connection from the darkness of critical isolation. It is a wonder to itself and to us all, a beautifully haunting enigma that lingers.
When You Leave I Disappear releases on August 20th from Shortwave Publishing. To directly support them, you can preorder here: https://shop.shortwavepublishing.com/products/when-you-leave-i-disappear-a-novella-paperback
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