The Book of Accidents

It is very difficult to define how I feel about this book. At first, I saw the things that I typically like about Chuck Wendig books - good pacing, humor, irreverence, bloody violence. But after a while it started to feel like a lot. The extremely self-aware dialogue felt like a lot, the many different POVs felt like a lot, and honestly, the fact that instead of ignoring that “funny feeling”, as Bo Burnham put it, that we're all feeling these days for the sake of escaping into a fantasy/horror novel, Wendig just leaned right into it, with not only characters bringing it up pretty regularly, but the whole story kind of hinges on it. Because Chuck Wendig is an asshole.

It starts simple enough, the way most horror stories begin. Nate Graves, his wife, Maddie, and son, Oliver, decide to move into Nate's childhood home after Nate's father dies and leaves the home to him in a roundabout way that's likely so he can screw Nate over one last time, as if a childhood of abuse wasn't enough. They decide to take the house for Oliver, who's extremely high empathy is making it difficult for him to even exist, and some woods and a fresh start seem like a good idea. It's not. Because as it turns out something has been going from world to world to get to Oliver, with the intention of ending everything once and for all.

Yes, that's right, this is a multi-verse story. We've got a lot of those lately, don't we? Must have something to do with that funny feeling again. Like Stories of Old on YouTube made an excellent video essay speculating why, which I highly recommend, though fair warning - it will likely make you cry and/or trigger an existential crisis. The Book of Accidents is very much in the vein of all these other multi-verse stories, except it calls out directly why we are so drawn to them right now - the impossibility of choice. The terror of id one thing had been different, we might be different. If we had been spared pain, if we had chosen someone else, if we had stood firm instead of running away. This book is about cycles of abuse, about how much you actually have to sacrifice to put more good in the world than bad, and finding your own power.

I think this book is fascinating with a lot of really cool ideas. I found that I didn't really love the experience of reading it though. It might have been because the dialogue was a little too on the nose. You know when an author is so good at making characters talk and act realistically, that it veers right into uncanny valley territory and your brain just refuses to accept it? That's kind of what this was like. The multiple POVs also felt tiresome, I really wanted to stick with one (if I could claim a preference, I think Maddie would have been good choice for a sole POV character). That said, the story was super cool. The horror aspects were awesome, the fantasy aspects were hella weird, and I love weird. I kind of just wish it were more of just one thing, or even a few things, rather than the explosion of things it is.