Book Review: Shadowlands

Shadowlands. Alan Kessler. Leviathan: Amazon Digital Services, Inc. May 30, 2013. Kindle Edition. 270 pages.

Reviewed by Starza Thompson.

Alan Kessler’s Shadowlands is a dark coming of age story about a boy whose worldview is fractured due to a neglectful mother and an abusive father. The reader quickly realizes that the boy, Steve Goldblatt, is unlike other children—he has created a world where mothers’ words turn into bees and dead grandmothers come alive during Halloween to kill grandsons. As we see the world through Steve’s eyes, we question his reliability as narrator because nothing is real and yet everything could be real. This intricate novel weaves fact with fiction, stuns the reader and forces us to question everything about Steve’s world.

Shadowlands challenges the psyche and horrifies us at times, both in how Steve is treated and in how Steve treats others. However, this is not a traditional psychological thriller or horror—there is more subtlety to how the genre of psychological horror plays out in this book.

Steve is not a likeable character—he treats others as a means to an end. His own distorted worldview, no doubt shaped by his abusive father and uncaring mother, forces him to treat others cruelly, though he would never think that his actions are cruel. In his distorted view, Steve believes that pain equals love and that to truly love someone, you have to cause he or she pain. Because of this, Steve hurts a lot of people throughout the duration of his life. However, it is hard not to feel sorry for him or to even justify his actions given his past.

The questioning of reality, the nonchalance surrounding the abuse Steve endures and his abuse of others may come easy for Kessler to write as the description of Steve’s family and the abuse he suffers seems to come from a place of knowledge.

The most difficult part of this book is trying to determine which of Steve’s friends are real and which are figments of his imagination. He builds up this world of people to help him function on a day-to-day basis, even reinventing himself to handle life, but you never really know whether or not these friends exist.  Kessler does an excellent job of making the reader question every action and every character in Steve’s life.

While extremely unreliable narrators such as Steve Goldblatt are sometimes difficult to read, through Steve’s voice Kessler illustrates vivid scenes and actions that come off as feeling authentic, even if the actual events are not. Descriptions of place and thought are absolutely beautiful—ordinary objects are described with such a unique view that the book is worth a read just to see how Kessler, a master of exposition, plays with language. However, I do wish we, as the reader, could better define which characters and scenes are real as it becomes confusing at times. Many readers enjoy the unknowns that psychological thrillers bring, but the complexities of Shadowlands occasionally prevent the reader from suspending disbelief.

Shadowlands tells a dark story of abuse and mental illness as Steve Goldblatt matures into an adult. While the extremely blurred line between reality and imagination is sometimes hard to swallow, this book is an interesting read. If the reader begins the novel knowing that some characters and scenes may not be real, the journey through the book will be a very exciting one to take. Just remember, nothing is as it seems, yet everything could be taken as it is.