Book Review: It Waits on the Top Floor, by Ben Farthing
A weird horror story about a Lovecraftian skyscraper.
Self-published, 2021, 296 pages
The tower appeared overnight, but it wants to keep you forever.
Thursday night, it was a dirt lot.
Friday morning, it was a 60-story skyscraper.
A tech billionaire wants the building’s secrets for herself. She hires a team to reverse-engineer the overnight construction. But she knows more than she’s letting on.
A curious 9-year-old decides there’s treasure inside, and goes exploring. His terrified dad chases close behind.
Inside, the facade of an empty office building is quickly shattered. Ghostly figures stalk the explorers. The walls themselves are hungry. And something is waiting on the top floor.
It Waits on the Top Floor is a typical example of "indie-published" work. The author obviously has a knack for storytelling and an ability to spin yarns, but he has not polished his craft and so the very intriguing premise and well-executed creepiness throughout the story is blunted a bit by the flat prose and the MacGuffins that never get picked up and threads that are never woven to completion.
The basic idea is weird and eerie. Literally overnight, a 60-story building appeared in a vacant lot outside of Richmond, Virginia. The book opens by telling us this, as well as introducing the main character, Chris, a failed architect whose wife has decided to leave him immediately after they adopted a boy named Eddie. It's a nice hook that drags us immediately into both the supernatural mystery and Chris's personal dramas. These two things drive the rest of the story.
Chris's wife Sherri is just an incidental character in the first chapter. The way in which she abandons him and their newly adopted son and basically says "peace out" is almost cartoonish.
Then Chris's old mentor and enemy, a professor of architecture who sabotaged his career because Chris "embarrassed" him by writing a paper with some bizarre theories about ancient buildings, shows up on his driveway. He has been hired by a wealthy individual to investigate this miraculous new building, and he wants Chris's help because apparently that research he did might actually be useful. As he and Chris fight in the driveway, Eddie overhears, misunderstands everything and gets the idea there is treasure in the building. Since he also overheard his new mom leaving, he decides (in damaged, neglected orphan fashion) that he needs to go into the building, find the treasure for his new dad, and thus prove himself useful so they can stay together.
Eddie is joined by a teenage girl who had buried some money in the vacant lot the night before a building appeared on top of it. Chris goes into the building after him (with Professor Asshole and their billionaire patron and her other hirelings), and weirdness ensues.
On one level, I admired how the author just put this all together. No time is lost in establishing Chris's situation, Eddie's personality, and implausibly throwing together a team of urban spelunkers who somehow manage to be the only ones in this building that magically appeared out of nowhere outside an American city, as if all sorts of federal agencies wouldn't be all over it.
However, all these plot elements are literally shoved together with little time to make them plausible. Chapters alternate between Chris's POV and Eddie's, as they explore the building, going higher and higher, finding each floor empty yet filled with bizarro not-quite-right imitations of a typical American office building. The elevators go up to the 120th floor though the building only has 60 floors visible from outside. Some floors are too large to fit in the building. Others are full of materials that reflect light in sanity-bending patterns. Eventually they encounter monsters.
Chris eventually uncovers some of the mysteries behind the building, as explained to him by the billionaire who initiated this expedition. It's very Lovecraft-themed although it doesn't explicitly name any of Lovecraft's creatures.
It's a quick read with a viscerally creepy feel. But the prose is plain and just spells out everything as it happens and thoughts as people think them.
This couldn't be real.
Chris stayed pressed against the wall.
Architectural mysteries were one thing. It was another thing to see up close these monsters that appeared and disappeared, and magically repaired damage to the building, and lifted their faces like garage doors to set loose tentacles that dissolved fingertips.
Roberts inspected his shortened fingers. "I can't feel a thing in my hand."
Micah leaned on a table to catch her breath. "Did it inject you with an anesthetic?"
Their stoicism was infuriating. "Maybe it sucked away his nerve endings! How can you be so calm about this? We need to get out of here."
"We've been over this," Micah said evenly.
And they had. Chris had tried everything. He couldn't escape a man with Roberts' size and speed, and he couldn't convince Micah to leave. Until another opportunity came up, he was stuck.
But so was Micah's plan.
This was a good Halloween read. It's continued in a second book (teased at the end of this one), called They Cling to the Hull (apparently the next book takes place on a spooky ocean liner that appeared from nowhere), but I wasn't really enthralled enough by this book to be eager to read the next.
My complete list of book reviews.
Self-published, 2021, 296 pages
The tower appeared overnight, but it wants to keep you forever.
Thursday night, it was a dirt lot.
Friday morning, it was a 60-story skyscraper.
A tech billionaire wants the building’s secrets for herself. She hires a team to reverse-engineer the overnight construction. But she knows more than she’s letting on.
A curious 9-year-old decides there’s treasure inside, and goes exploring. His terrified dad chases close behind.
Inside, the facade of an empty office building is quickly shattered. Ghostly figures stalk the explorers. The walls themselves are hungry. And something is waiting on the top floor.
It Waits on the Top Floor is a typical example of "indie-published" work. The author obviously has a knack for storytelling and an ability to spin yarns, but he has not polished his craft and so the very intriguing premise and well-executed creepiness throughout the story is blunted a bit by the flat prose and the MacGuffins that never get picked up and threads that are never woven to completion.
The basic idea is weird and eerie. Literally overnight, a 60-story building appeared in a vacant lot outside of Richmond, Virginia. The book opens by telling us this, as well as introducing the main character, Chris, a failed architect whose wife has decided to leave him immediately after they adopted a boy named Eddie. It's a nice hook that drags us immediately into both the supernatural mystery and Chris's personal dramas. These two things drive the rest of the story.
Chris's wife Sherri is just an incidental character in the first chapter. The way in which she abandons him and their newly adopted son and basically says "peace out" is almost cartoonish.
Then Chris's old mentor and enemy, a professor of architecture who sabotaged his career because Chris "embarrassed" him by writing a paper with some bizarre theories about ancient buildings, shows up on his driveway. He has been hired by a wealthy individual to investigate this miraculous new building, and he wants Chris's help because apparently that research he did might actually be useful. As he and Chris fight in the driveway, Eddie overhears, misunderstands everything and gets the idea there is treasure in the building. Since he also overheard his new mom leaving, he decides (in damaged, neglected orphan fashion) that he needs to go into the building, find the treasure for his new dad, and thus prove himself useful so they can stay together.
Eddie is joined by a teenage girl who had buried some money in the vacant lot the night before a building appeared on top of it. Chris goes into the building after him (with Professor Asshole and their billionaire patron and her other hirelings), and weirdness ensues.
On one level, I admired how the author just put this all together. No time is lost in establishing Chris's situation, Eddie's personality, and implausibly throwing together a team of urban spelunkers who somehow manage to be the only ones in this building that magically appeared out of nowhere outside an American city, as if all sorts of federal agencies wouldn't be all over it.
However, all these plot elements are literally shoved together with little time to make them plausible. Chapters alternate between Chris's POV and Eddie's, as they explore the building, going higher and higher, finding each floor empty yet filled with bizarro not-quite-right imitations of a typical American office building. The elevators go up to the 120th floor though the building only has 60 floors visible from outside. Some floors are too large to fit in the building. Others are full of materials that reflect light in sanity-bending patterns. Eventually they encounter monsters.
Chris eventually uncovers some of the mysteries behind the building, as explained to him by the billionaire who initiated this expedition. It's very Lovecraft-themed although it doesn't explicitly name any of Lovecraft's creatures.
It's a quick read with a viscerally creepy feel. But the prose is plain and just spells out everything as it happens and thoughts as people think them.
This couldn't be real.
Chris stayed pressed against the wall.
Architectural mysteries were one thing. It was another thing to see up close these monsters that appeared and disappeared, and magically repaired damage to the building, and lifted their faces like garage doors to set loose tentacles that dissolved fingertips.
Roberts inspected his shortened fingers. "I can't feel a thing in my hand."
Micah leaned on a table to catch her breath. "Did it inject you with an anesthetic?"
Their stoicism was infuriating. "Maybe it sucked away his nerve endings! How can you be so calm about this? We need to get out of here."
"We've been over this," Micah said evenly.
And they had. Chris had tried everything. He couldn't escape a man with Roberts' size and speed, and he couldn't convince Micah to leave. Until another opportunity came up, he was stuck.
But so was Micah's plan.
This was a good Halloween read. It's continued in a second book (teased at the end of this one), called They Cling to the Hull (apparently the next book takes place on a spooky ocean liner that appeared from nowhere), but I wasn't really enthralled enough by this book to be eager to read the next.
My complete list of book reviews.