Phoning it in

First of all, I need to out Erica, because girl, I know you want to keep your book reviews on your own site, but that cogent commentary belongs here, dammit. :-)

So. The feeling I kept having about The Gravedigger's Cottage was "Wow! I like that idea! I wonder where that's going to go?" followed soon after by "Oh -- that was pretty much it, huh." I was excited to find out how Sylvia and Walter were going to be so different, yet so alike. And then... they really weren't so much. I was excited to watch the pet deaths unfold and build, except that they didn't really build, and because they all ended with death and didn't provide any images of the aftermath of death, we never got to really see their impact. Even the mom deaths. So then what we have is this family that's supposedly dealing with some really heavy baggage, and working it out (specially old Dad) in wonderfully weird ways, with neat metaphors (spackle the house to keep the death out! kill the rat and kill the fear!) except that the baggage isn't real enough. It isn't tangible enough. And all that's really there is the wonderful weirdness, which isn't that wonderful because it has all the emotional resonance of a sitcom.

I hate it when stories that are about characters don't take the time to craft their characters. Everyone felt like a character description to me rather than a person. Chris, you know I love you and you're dead sexy, but I wish you'd worked a little harder on this one. Especially since I thought Freewill was kind of brilliant.