Content warnings: murder, slut-shaming, some gore, animal death (not the cat though)
TL;W[on’t]R[read the review]: An interesting enough first half that spiraled out of control and ended with some squicky YA tropes.
Summary [courtesy of Goodreads]: Ellerie Downing lives in the quiet town of Amity Falls in the Blackspire Mountain range–five narrow peaks stretching into the sky like a grasping hand, bordered by a nearly impenetrable forest from which the early townsfolk fought off the devils in the woods. To this day, visitors are few and rare. But when a supply party goes missing, some worry that the monsters that once stalked the region have returned. As fall turns to winter, more strange activities plague the town. They point to a tribe of devilish and mystical creatures who promise to fulfill the residents’ deepest desires, however grand and impossible, for just a small favor. But their true intentions are much more sinister, and Ellerie finds herself in a race against time before all of Amity Falls, her family, and the boy she loves go up in flames.
[Note: This review is based on an eARC from NetGalley and Delacourte Press [Random House Children’s].]
Can people PLEASE stop beat-for-beat recreating chunks of Stephen King books??
First it was CJ Tudor and her earlier works, where she tried (and failed) to copy King’s TONE as well as his plots. Now it’s this, which is (to be fair) at least is 80% it’s own work, until it becomes, toward the end, 99.9% Needful Things.
Folks. Stephen King may have come up with some cool ideas, much longer ago than we all collectively seem to think (1990 was not actually 20 years ago, yes?), but he’s still problematic as fuck, suffers from white-guy liberalism, and thinks a sprinkle of magical token characters will save us all. We don’t need to mimic him!!
I’m ALL for taking his material and adapting it into something more radical, more truly inclusive, more focused on marginalized voices (BY marginalized voices). But this…is not that.
Before I launch into the full rant, I will say that I DID enjoy the first half of this book, though it was a bit slow for my taste. The writing was immersive enough, and it seemed like the main character Ellerie was being set up to grow into a strong, assertive woman rebelling against her patriarchal community. That…didn’t fully happen. And to say any more finds me in
SPOILER TERRITORY
The blurb for this novel compares it to M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, so I was expecting a timeline twist at any given moment and for Ellerie to have to confront modern people to save her village. That…didn’t happen, thank god. [A quick note on The Village, which I have not seen but know the plot of because I DID read Margaret Peterson Haddix’s ‘90s YA novel Running Out of Time, which Shyamalan stole: read that novel instead. I remember it being very good. Don’t watch the movie–I’ve only heard bad things. Also, intellectual property theft sucks.)
But this book is only like The Village insofar as it’s about an old-timey village, and there are monsters. Ellerie has to take on increased responsibilities in her family and farm as her father must take her critically injured mother to ‘the city,’ and her good-for-nothing shitweasel twin brother alternately shirks his duties, sabotages their beehives, and whines about how hard his life is. (Ohhhh god did I hate her twin brother. He was also the epitome of toxic masculinity with his girlfriend Rebecca. I DID appreciate that Ellerie’s attempts to ‘redeem’ him or support him came to nothing. It provided a good lesson about how some people are just shitty, regardless of any intervention, magical or otherwise.)
One of my main hangups with the novel (other than the full-on Needful Things climax) is the way Ellerie falls prey to a whole slew of older YA tropes, as she falls in instalove with the predatory Whitaker, who (to the surprise of no one) turns out to be one of the evil “Dark Watchers” tormenting the villagers and causing them to go full-on Castle Rock on each other. Whitaker’s voyeur-like introduction is skeezy as hell, as are his continual re-entries into the narrative. In the final reveal, we learn that not only is he a “Dark Watcher,” he’s been stalking Ellerie this entire time, because she’s so beautiful and has fancy hair and blah blah blah…
I don’t read this kind of YA, usually (I didn’t realize this WAS “this kind” of YA), so I don’t know how common this trope still is in the genre, but it’s seemed so very toxic since the days of Edward Cullen, and I thought it’d gone the way of sparkly vampires and dreary rain-filters. But apparently not?
The novel ends with Ellerie severing Whitaker’s ties to the Dark Watchers, allowing him to choose life with her as a free man. And now they can all live happily ever…
Shudder.
At the same time, her village has descended into murderous chaos, and most of it is on fire. The Dark Watchers have sown discord and mistrust, granting “small favors” in secret to townspeople in exchange for “pranks” or outright crimes, which have turned everyone against each other. I will admit, it was fucking hilarious to see the overarcing conceit of Needful Things, a book VERY MUCH about and for adults, play out in this ostensibly YA novel. The ending, with murders and conflagrations happening left and right as Ellerie races through the town to save her family (and fail to save her shitweasel brother, who gets an axe through the gut [yay]), was awe-inspiring, though maybe not in the intended way. I just couldn’t believe Craig went there, so sustainedly, and so totally. The thing about King’s novel, despite all of its myriad problems (most of which I can’t remember, because I read it at 14), is that it had stakes. A whole decade’s worth of them, since his Castle Rock was at the center or at least periphery of all of his Maine-centered novels. Blowing up the town and ruining the lives of its townspeople meant something because readers had gotten to know the town for thousands of pages. This novel…obviously doesn’t have that. Instead, it’s basically just grand-guignol style violence FOR NO REASON. It’d make for a helluva Netflix season finale, but here, for me, it was way more over-the-top cackling schadenfreude than pathos or horror.
Ultimately, my issues with Small Favors came down to tone and execution. The slow build of dread and the escalating horrifying events didn’t come together in a satisfying way, and the mythology of the Dark Watchers and their ability to control…everything(?) didn’t make sense. This also gets into a problematic, though common enough, approach the book took to monstrosity via deformity. From the initial mutated wolf-monsters whose eyes and claws scared everyone, to the many-limbed stag and lidless newborn farm animals, to the Queen of the Dark Watchers’s fingers (whose disturbing length is the defining monstrous element about her), bodily difference harbingers death and desolation. That’s hardly a new trope–it’s as old as stories, in some cultures–but it’s a harmful and tired one, and it was disappointing to see here, particularly as it didn’t really build to anything (unlike Annihilation’s cli-fi commentary or Sorrowland’s politicized yet empowering twist).
[As a final aside, I would recommend Amanda Leduc’s Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space as a corrective analysis of these old-fashioned tropes.]
