Synopsis:
The Martins need a new home for their growing family. For Alison, Nathan, daughter Dru, and foster child Lailah, it’s love at first sight when they see the house in Tumbling Hills. It even has a cozy attic, which is great for Lailah; she needs a quiet place to be alone when her intrusive thoughts creep in.
(crack an egg into the coffee machine)
The family gets settled. The house is perfect, and so is the timing – Lailah’s adoption will soon be finalized.
(push your sister down the stairs)
Review:
One hell of a haunted house novel, full of familiar furniture: the usual gnarled beams and scares in the attic, but also an astronomical amount of heart, Chris Panatier’s “Worry Box,” was one of my most anticipated of the year and it delivers in spectacular fashion. A suburban horror novel that gets tense quick, this multi-POV story is a chorus of intrusive thoughts and conflicting interests and had me turning the pages like a sweaty-palmed madman. Aptly for a novel called “Worry Box,” I was really quite worried: there’s an endorsement. A superb concept executed excellently, Panatier defies many of the rules you might associate with the haunted house trope, and delivers still something terrifying and completely unique. It’s beautiful and riddled with anxiety. You must have it, and you can, when it releases from Angry Robot Books September 22nd.
We follow Lailah who is being fostered by the Martins. Things are looking great, and Alison, Nathan and Dru, as well as Lailah’s caseworker believe that Lailah has, adoption pending, found her forever home. But Bad luck has a habit of ruining things for her. Lailah suffers from intrusive thoughts, mental splinters that are difficult to tweeze out, and when the family moves into an idyllic house in Tumbling Hills (for an absolute steal of course) things get more intense, and whatever inhabits the place knows.
“Worry Box,” is a novel that meditates on trauma, and the fact that it is a squatter. It rarely is confined to the past. Lailah’s trauma stems from the complete absence of stability in her life so far and her time spent with her cruel and neglectful aunt and uncle. As a result, she is terrified that the courts, and the spectre of Bad luck will send her to live there once again, and take her away from the loving family she has found- a pending apocalypse. Panatier personifies Bad luck as some malicious force lurking around each corner, searching for a way to snatch happiness from her, such is the irrational but completely empathetic logic of anxiety. What if? Nathan, who aged out of the foster system is almost just as anxious about the possibility of Lailah being taken from them, informed by his own childhood. And our ‘ghost,’ too acts based off of its experiences- a commentary upon how places remember too, and are warped by atrocity, the violence and tragedy that occurred there having seeped into its foundations. Perhaps that is what makes a house haunted to begin.
The family dynamic in this novel is the best part of it, and it’s all great. Nathan and Alison are great parents, very much in love with one another, Dru is a rebellious music-lover who reads like Chris if he was a nine year old girl, and Lailah slots into this family unit perfectly. They feel real in the ways that matter. It’s warm and comfortable and you feel you’ve got a seat at the table until you realise your chair is outside and you’re actually tied to it, everything is taking a decidedly nasty turn, and you can’t personally warn the Martins. The conflicts, when they inevitably come, are equally authentic. Nathan is not naive per say but far more willing to believe his children, Alison is far more skeptical when things do go wrong, but never feels like an antagonist or unreasonable (Dru staunchly remains Chris as a nine year old girl). There are conflicts and clashes and various uncomfortable moments, mistakes and regrets, but never, no matter how frightening, frustrating or heart-breaking things get, are you not rooting for this family.
In conclusion then, hell yeah. A beautifully written, unrelentingly propulsive subversion of the haunted house trope, “Worry Box,” is magnificent, further cementing Panatier as one of the finest and most varied horror authors working today, equally adept at breaking your heart, making you laugh and scaring you shitless. Couldn’t recommend enough.
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