Langan, Sarah: Audrey's Door
Audrey's Door (2009)
Written by: Sarah Langan
Genre: Horror
Pages: 412 (Mass Market Paperback)
Why I Read It: October's book club theme was "Oh, the Horror!" and all of you voted on Audrey's Door for our scare-fest of the month. I'd heard about this book years ago, when it won the Stoker in 2009. And when I was asking around for great haunted house stories, this one came up over and over, so I was quite curious to see if the book lived up to all the hype. So, let's see what Audrey's Door had in store for us, shall we?
The premise: ganked from Amazon.com: Built on the Upper West Side, the elegant Breviary claims a regal history. But despite 14B's astonishingly low rental price, the recent tragedy within its walls has frightened away all potential tenants . . . except for Audrey Lucas.
No stranger to tragedy at thirty-two-a survivor of a fatherless childhood and a mother's hopeless dementia- Audrey is obsessively determined to make her own way in a city that often strangles the weak. But is it something otherworldly or Audrey's own increasing instability that's to blame for the dark visions that haunt her . . . and for the voice that demands that she build a door? A door it would be true madness to open . . .
Spoilers, yay or nay?: Yay. As with all book club selections, there will be spoilers, so if you're trying to avoid them, just skip to "My Rating" and you'll be in good shape. Everyone else, onward!
I don't read a lot of horror, which is odd, when you think of it, because I was one of those kids raised on R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike back in the day. But the difference between me and those kids was that I never really fell in love with the genre. I read a little more of it in the teen section at the time, but I didn't go out and seek horror movies. I didn't go out and seek Stephen King novels or Anne Rice, and that's what a lot of my contemporaries WERE doing. So maybe it makes sense that I don't read a lot of horror. I don't know. I do know that I'm hard to scare, in terms of story and imagery really getting under my skin and freaking me out, so I consider it the highest of all praises if, when I do read something that's horror or has a horror bent, that I can point to it and say, "That book scared the shit out of me." I can't think of a book, in recent memory, that's done that. Probably because horror tropes and imagery have become rather mainstream, so that makes me a relatively jaded reader.
I say all of this to provide some context: no, I don't read horror so my opinion on this book are more of a reader's reaction than a critical examination of the genre. And as a reader who's also a writer who's had both educational training and scores of writer workshops under her belt, I've got a slightly different perspective on some things. This, of course, is true for all reviews I write, but I'm just asking readers of this review to keep that in mind while reading this one, because things that get to me aren't things that would normally bother people. Though I could be wrong: after all, that's what this discussion is for, isn't it?
One of the things I've been chewing over, especially after reading this book, is that horror, often but not always, is meant to punish its victims for some kind of sin, real or imagined. Oh, there's plenty of horror that takes place where the victims are in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it often seems that as the story unfolds, things happen that sort of reveal that those victims aren't so innocent after all. Those of you who've seen Cabin in the Woods know exactly what I'm talking about, and anyone watching American Horror Story: Asylum is definitely seeing that in spades: I don't want to come out and say that all of the victims deserve what happens to them (though I can't be the only one who watches horror movies and roots for the bad guy at times) in these stories, but you start seeing a parallel between sin and punishment, a relationship between physical horror and psychological. I think in Audrey's Door, we're not looking at characters who deserve to be punished because they aren't so innocent, so much as we're looking at characters who experience horror externally that reflects their broken states of mind. In other words, the actual, physical horror of the book wouldn't have happened if there wasn't a psychological rift already there.
And I think that's what ultimately fell flat for me in this book. So much of the "horror," at least from the start, came from nightmares, pure and simple. Oh sure, the house was influencing the nightmares. Sure, as the book progressed, what felt like nightmares might've actually been happening, yet as long as the character is convinced these are nightmares, it's hard to take them seriously. The same with hallucinations: Audrey's mental instabilities created an atmosphere with no tension. For example: Audrey seeing the man in the three-piece suit at her workplace while she's trying to give a presentation was supposed to be scary. We know the house is influencing her, right? Yet because of her instability, it's easy to right it off and Audrey coming unhinged. Or both. And while that should've created tension, it would've been better if she had been secure in her own sanity and had ignored it the whole time, giving the reader a sense of, "Oh, crap, please pay attention, he's there, he's there!" kind of thing that the character wouldn't realize until the last minute, you know?
The frustrating thing about the interplay between real horror and imagined is the fact that Audrey realizes, by the end of it, that she's been sane all along. She knows she has her problems, she knows she needs help. But she's not batshit crazy. It was the house wigging her out, that's all. Yet…. that feels unearned somehow? We've spent the entire book with Audrey, learning that she's not quite normal, she doesn't quite fit in, and while that can make for an interesting character in and of itself, seeing the house change her from that to someone ready to kill wasn't really satisfying, because I never felt I really knew her or empathized with her as a character to start.
And this is where I'm having trouble putting thoughts into words. The house made her crazy, made her do things she would never, under normal circumstances, do. Yet that just wasn't interesting to me.
Let's go back to that later.
I think I was turned off from immersion of the story by some basic things: the first, the writing style. It wasn't horrible. But when it started pulling the camera out to show us exactly what the heroine looked like in the beginning, I got a little grumpy. It's a valid type of POV, but it's old school, and one I don't care for whatsoever. Worse, though, were the info-dumps, where a character would be doing something stagnant (like riding in an elevator) and we'd suddenly get their entire life story. Then there was the authorial foreshadowing: we'd end a chapter where the narrator (this book isn't written in the first person POV, btw) states that had characters known what was in store, they would have never done X. Ugh. As a reader, this is a bland, generic style. As a writer, I work hard to eliminate such things from my own craft, because I think it creates a stronger, more unique voice. That's just me, but all these things pulled me out of the story, made me seriously consider the craft, instead of getting sucked into the novel's brand of horror. And that doesn't include the author's use of tired tropes: such as Audrey finally discovering a piece of herself when she doesn't have sex for the first time, but allows herself to really feel sex for the first time and have an orgasm. Because, somehow, she wasn't whole without this. And, coincidentally or not, the horror of the story doesn't REALLY get started until she has this sexual awakening.
The characters were just hard to like, too. I don't know if I'm supposed to be rooting for them to succeed or the house to get its ultimate goal. That's tough. I should fall on one side of the equation, you know? Saraub grated on me in so many ways, I can't even begin to count, other than how stupid was he for letting the company fund his film that his film is all about exposing? Maybe I misunderstood (not hard, since I didn't care about his story), but that's such a huge conflict of interest he deserved to have his project canned. I did, however, like his realizations when he thought the plane was crashing, about how he should've said something to Audrey, shouldn't have left her in the cold. While I wasn't rooting for this couple in any sense of the word (in fact, I rather thought they loved each other because they were all each other HAD), I was glad to see him really understand what he should've done.
What was surprising, and something I enjoyed, was Audrey's relationship with her mother. That bit of healing seemed out of place, but this is what really makes Audrey whole, though she has her worst spell with the house right after when she tries to kill Saraub. But despite the house's best efforts to afflict both of them (Saraub isn't there for very long before the house starts making him crazy), they manage to take back control of their own minds and make it out alive? What? I have to say, I was shocked by the happy ending (or happy enough ending) that the book provides. Again, because I'm not sure I feel it's deserved, and also, for some reason, after all that build up of the door and learning what lies on the other sides (humanity's soulless twins), I wanted to spend a little more time there. I wanted things to become more precarious, more dangerous. I love what we learned about this world, about what the shadow ants really were and what that meant for Betty's madness and Audrey's relationship with her mother, but I felt no sense of danger other than what horror movies have conditioned me to expect: namely, that usually just one person makes it out alive. We had not just one person make it out alive, but three: Audrey, Saraub, and their unborn child (and I can't believe the fetus survived all the stresses Audrey was put through…. the starvation alone should've caused some problems).
I think, ultimately, this book is meant to be a character-driven horror story, in that everything that happens is ultimately a result of the characters' actions. Sure, the Breviary was around long before Audrey moved in, but she chose to move in despite it not being the wisest move: would you really want to move into a place where the last tenant murdered her own children? Believe in ghosts or not, that's just bad karma. Yet the story really focused on Audrey's brokenness and her path to becoming whole. The house just took her hangups and forced her to examine all of them, and yes, it manipulated her into doing what it wanted, but in the end, she took back her life and got a happy ending. And when I look at it from that standpoint, I'm not sure what was so scary: that she could've given up so much had she let the house completely and totally control her? That any of us, without a strong sense of who we are and why, are subject to that kind of external, evil manipulation? And while the Breviary was responsible for its tenants' torture, one could really say it was that shadow world acting through the Breviary, so that perhaps, by the end, what Audrey was fighting wasn't the Breviary at all, but her shadow self nature?
There's a lot of food for thought, but none of it scared me. Frankly, I was just excited to be done with the thing.
My Rating: Problematic, but Promising
I can see what excites people about this book. There's definitely some promise there, and the question of what it really means to be haunted and who's really doing the haunting. That's great stuff. My problem was I was never fully invested in the characters enough to care about what happened to them, nor was I invested in the Breviary enough to want it to win. With horror, you've got to be rooting for someone, and I was rooting to finish the book as soon as I could. What really pulled me out of the potential immersion was the writing style. It's fast, easy-to-read, but I found it bland and rather generic, with some stylistic choices that make my inner work-shopper itch for a red pen. I'd love to hear what regular horror readers think of this and how it compares to other horror novels (particularly since it won the Stoker), and I'm also curious if anyone else has read anything else by Langan, and how this compares to the author's own work? For my own part, I don't see myself picking up another book by this author unless the premise really, really speaks to me, but I'm never adverse to reading horror either. It's just a matter of the premise really, really speaking to me. Horror, as a whole, is a genre that's meant to engage the mind and the emotions. For me, Audrey's Door didn't come close, but what shining moments it had were promising.
Cover Commentary: Meh. The model on the cover doesn't look like what I envisioned (she's got white blonde hair, when it's stated over and over that Audrey was a natural brunette!). I wish the building hadn't looked so traditional either… I would've skilled for some sketches to see what this type of building would look like in practice, and this didn't come close!
Further Reading: With the theme of Oh, the Horror!, horror stories were all that counted. You can check out some of the books I've previous read and labeled "horror" here, and the other titles you all voted on were:
Alden Bell's The Reapers Are The Angels
Robert Jackson Bennett's Mr. Shivers
Daryl Gregory's Pandemonium
More Reviews: Check out the reviews book club participants have posted! If you reviewed this book but are not featured here, please comment below with a link to your review and I'll add it below.
intoyourlungs: Review Here
seeking: Review Here
starmetal_oak: Review Here
temporaryworlds: Review Here
Worlds Without End: Review Here
Book Club Poll: Just so you know, I'm not tracking participation points, but I do want to have some idea of how popular or unpopular a book club selection is, hence, the poll. If you're not on Live Journal, you can still vote using OpenID! Just go to Live Journal's home page and in the upper right-hand corner, log in using said OpenID address, and then you can vote on this page!
Poll October Participation
If you started the book but couldn't finish it, please comment and talk about the reasons why. What turned you off from the book? How far did you go before throwing in the towel?
And as you already know, the November Book Club selection is N.K. Jemisin's The Killing Moon. Some of you may have started it already, but if need additional details on the title, just click here.
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