It is Happening Again

On Susan Barker's "Old Soul"

Horror and comedy, in their simplest forms, both rely on setup and release, and both are among the toughest genres to convincingly nail. A lot of architecture goes into making both a joke or a scare work, and the exemplars of either genre will either skillfully hide all that scaffolding or wrongfoot you enough times to keep things surprising, all while escalating the stakes. If any part of the operation becomes expected, well, the jokes aren’t as funny and the monster in the dark corner of the room doesn’t scare you (as much). In the current literary post-genre moment – famously, Toni Morrison’s Beloved was a Pulitzer Prize winning haunted houses story, Cormac McCarthy’s career took off when he started writing westerns and thrillers, and Colson Whitehead, one of America’s most famous living writers (the bar is low) writes zombie novels (Zone One) and fantasy-adjacent historical novels (The Underground Railroad) – a book between genres will find the wrong audience; genre-heads dislike the literary aspects, and literary readers dislike the genre aspects. So many 1 star Goodreads reviews of Don Quixote, A Confederacy of Dunces, True Grit and even a newer comedy classic like The Sellout bemoan the fact that the characters just keep making jokes, or that the author continually puts them in comedic situations, when, well, that’s showbiz, baby. Horror, on the other hand, has the opposite issue, where literary situations that are merely eerie or just a little freaky are deemed not scary enough by readers looking for visceral, bone-deep scares, even if there are plenty of ways to achieve the affect of unease under the wide umbrella of ‘horror.’ Coming a decade after her previous novel, The Incarnations, the British author Susan Barker’s latest book, Old Soul, is a book that satisfies neither camp of reader, literary or horror-obsessed. It’s a horror-thriller mishmash that begins with an ingeniously haunting premise before falling into rote repetition, becoming something worse than simply not all that scary: just a bit boring. Whatever glimmers of a more interesting novel exist under the surface – a novel about sickness, vulnerability, hidden trauma, and the abuses of friendship and companionship – are unfortunately buried beneath an unwieldy and repetitive structure.