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Synopsis:
A chilling domestic story of terror for fans of Black Mirror and The Amityville Horror .
When a young family moves into an unfinished development community, cracks begin to emerge in both their new residence and their lives, as a mysterious online DIY instructor delivers dark subliminal suggestions about how to handle any problem around the house. The trials of home improvement, destructive insecurities, and haunted house horror all collide in this thrilling story perfect for fans of Nick Cutter’s bestsellers The Troop and The Deep.
Review:
The Handyman Method is a collaboration between Nick Cutter and Andrew F. Sullivan that started as a short story and eventually expanded to a full length novel, one piece at a time. It tells that story of the Saban family, Trent, Rita, and their son Milo, who move into their dream home, only to find nothing but problems. Trent’s personality radically starts to change as soon as they move in after he finds a crack in the drywall closet and decides to fix it himself. He is angry at the housebuilder, but with the help of a handyman channel on YouTube, the job should be fairly easy. It does not take long for his home improvements to become an obsession, his trips to the Home Depot to become a daily occurrence, and Trent turns into a chauvinistic, insufferable prick. This structure and story reminds me so much of The Shining, where a husband, wife, and son are in a building that has wide influence on the father, to the point where the father loses sight of the person he is supposed to be. Trent’s transformation is much more severe than Jack Torrence’s but Rita has an option that Wendy did not have. She can leave. The novel progresses and the situation grows worse and worse, until the only thing that can happen is for Trent to fight the house.
I loved a large majority of this novel. Even though Trent does things that made me very uncomfortable while reading them, I know that this is him compensating for the insecurities that he feels, that way that he makes mistakes throughout his whole life, and that the house is exploiting these feelings. Trent is purposefully written as a horrible person doing horrible things, and even though we do not necessarily like Trent at all through this novel, Cutter and Sullivan construct a family that we want to survive this house.
This is sort of a haunted house novel, but the house really psychologically manipulating Trent instead of trying to scare him. Everything that it does to him is upfront and bold. Whether it be a crack in the wall, a leaky outside faucet, or the house sinking and the roof caving in, the house uses it’s forces to draw Trent obsession with home improvements into a mixture of male ego accomplishment and utter destruction beyond Trent’s abilities to fix, thus turning Trent into an increasingly belligerent person. The house does some very weird things, and I liked that the battle between the house and Trent turns into a war.
I enjoyed The Handyman Method much more than I have enjoyed many books I have recently read. However this is one of those rare books that I could have used a bigger information dump in the final quarter to really understand the history behind what was happening. The ambiguity does work, but I would have loved to have a little more a history lesson. Other than that, this is a very good, psychologically frightening novel. If Nick Cutter and Andrew F Sullivan decide to write another novel together, I will be excited to read it.
I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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