Book Review: "Brat" by Gabriel Smith

I'm in a good book slump at the moment in which I am trying out all this new fiction in desperation of finding something new, exciting and most of all - well written. BUT, on top of this I'm also trying to keep up with my reading of one random author I have never heard of. I have to say that killing two birds with one stone in this case probably did not go the way I had imagined it would. Though I find Gabriel Smith to probably be one of the next great talents of horror, this book on the whole, missed the mark for me. However, it wasn't all bad. Let's take a look at what's going on for me here.

The book opens with our main character who shares a name with our author (though I do not think that this book is representative of anything really autobiographical however, it may do in spirit). The book seems to be about dealing with grief and how to overcome that sense of turbulence that comes with losing someone and not having the answers of what exactly to do next. Our protagonist is a young writer with an older brother who is a lot older than him. He has recently gone through a break up and has moved back into his childhood home which is also owned by the older brother. His task is to empty the house in order for the older brother to get it valued by a real estate agent.

The problem is, our narrator is self-destructive. He meets random young people outside a corner shop and buys them alcohol and cigarettes, only for the younger versions of them to appear in an old video featuring his own mother. As this is happening, he discovers the manuscript that his mother wrote but never published. The narrative is about a man who will never know why his wife was in a car with another man after the car crashes and she dies. The strange thing is that the main character has the same name as his mother and, in the video with the child-versions of the two young people, there is another man - a Spanish looking man. Though, his mother is still alive. When he goes to check out the manuscript again, it has changed.

As this is happening, our narrator's skin starts peeling off. The peeling of the skin is part of the story and investigation happening in the manuscript after it starts to change. His older brother doesn't believe him. Littered with drug use and alcoholism, this novel becomes more and more twisted as time goes on. But...

It kind of falls off. The second half of the book is a simple repetition of the first part just with more whining. Hinging your entire narrative on such an unlikeable character is never useful when you're trying to pull the reader into a narrative based mainly off grief and transformation. The deer-man was also a weird addition which started and then kind of went nowhere important. I feel like that part of the story could have been cut out without much of anything really being changed.

The novel is written in kind of a droning way and after a while it can get really boring to actually sit and read it. A lot of the phrases, words and even entire sentences get repeated too often. I understand it is an experimental style but it really did not suit the way in which the book evolved into something else entirely. I think that though the concept sounded good, it just didn't feel right in the context of this novel.

All in all, there were some good things about this book definitely, but there were too many things that dragged me out of the story and made me feel like what I was reading was just the angsty ramblings of a young person who feels disaffected by the world because he's not getting what he wants. In an almost Catcher in the Rye style if Holden grew up to be an insufferable and privileged 20-something with an incredibly limited vocabulary, this book would probably require me to read it a second time to actually appreciate it.

Watch this space.