Yzabel / March 15, 2015

Harrison Squared by Daryl Gregory

My rating: [rating=3]

Blurb:

Harrison Harrison—H2 to his mom—is a lonely teenager who’s been terrified of the water ever since he was a toddler in California, when a huge sea creature capsized their boat, and his father vanished. One of the “sensitives” who are attuned to the supernatural world, Harrison and his mother have just moved to the worst possible place for a boy like him: Dunnsmouth, a Lovecraftian town perched on rocks above the Atlantic, where strange things go on by night, monsters lurk under the waves, and creepy teachers run the local high school.

On Harrison’s first day at school, his mother, a marine biologist, disappears at sea. Harrison must attempt to solve the mystery of her accident, which puts him in conflict with a strange church, a knife­wielding killer, and the Deep Ones, fish­-human hybrids that live in the bay. It will take all his resources—and an unusual host of allies—to defeat the danger and find his mother.

Review:

(I got a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.)

A good story (definitely a 3.5 stars more than a 3), but one that also confirms once again that, in my opinion, “Lovecraftian influences” don’t go too well with “written for YA audience”: they need to be too downplayed, and end up too remote from the usually bleak, no-hope tone the original stories used to have, combined to the feeling of Sublime (in Burke’s meaning of this word) elicited by the appearance of Old Ones and various eldritch creatures. In turn, the novel was interesting, but…

I didn’t experience the same fascination I had when reading We Are All Completely Fine (the novel where H2 appears as an adult, along with another victim of the Scrimshander). The ingredients were here, only it didn’t seem there was much of a sense of danger, in a setting that begged anyone, reader included, to run away without ever looking back. It would have been better if it had been upped to real horror, and not, I suspect, downplayed to fit a younger public. (Especially since teenagers can very well read and appreciate genuine Lovecraft stories—I started reading those when I was 15, and it never was a problem.)

On the other hand, this book introduces characters I liked reading about. Selena was funny, yet definitely here to support her nephew in spite of the way she first appeared as “childish”: not the air-head she seemed to be, but a grown-up and serious woman, simply with a punny take on life. The kids had more depth than I would have given them credit for at first—including Lub, who kept making me smile but whose own approach on life must somehow have made lonely, in regard to his peers. And there was not a hint of romance between Harrison and Lydia (although everybody insisted she was his girlfriend, both made fun of this and dismissed it immediately). It’s refreshing enough in a category where every boy and girl always seems to find his/her “soul mate” two days after the beginning of the story.

The setting itself, Dunnsmouth, also hit the spot as far as “gloomy” and “creepy” were concerned. The strange atmosphere at school, the weird subjects (non-Euclidean geometry? Making nets? Uh…), the kids who all look like each others, the teachers with strange behaviours, the mysterious library with its equally mysterious librarian… These were well-rendered. No matter what, both in terms of settings and characters, I still found the Scrimshander as fascinating as ever. An urban-legend villain without a definite face, half-hidden under the brim of his hat, popping out of nowhere, performing gruesome magic by engraving bones with portraits of his victims… I thought he was intriguing in WAACF, and he remained fascinating here.

Conclusion: a good novel, only one I wish had upped the stakes where the horror element was concerned.