Josh Malerman‘s prose has the persistent feel of discovery to it. The author of Bird Box, Daphne, and Incidents Around the House is never lacking in craft, but there’s something in his words that always generates the feeling that he’s writing straight from the gut, letting the narrative pull him along and grabbing our hand to take us along as he goes floating by. It makes his books compulsively readable, and at its best, creates the sensation that everything we’re reading is not designed, but pre-existing and strangely inevitable.
Malerman has lost none of that quality with Pictures of You, his latest novel and his first since Incidents, even if the narrative doesn’t always click with the same relentless energy of his past successes. The storytelling feels a little uneven this time around, but emotionally, thematically, viscerally, Malerman’s clarity of vision persists, creating a compulsively readable book that, bumps and all, I could not put down.
Emily’s last memory is of a wonderful night out with Jack, her boyfriend of six months, so when she wakes up in an unfamiliar room, her first thought is that the night might have been just a bit more adventurous than she thought. But Jack is not there to answer her when she calls; her phone is missing, and she’s in an unfamiliar bed in unfamiliar clothes. Even stranger, she seems to be the captive of a mysterious woman, at first visible only in silhouette, on the other side of the room, looking at her through an empty picture frame. What begins as confusing soon turns frightening, as Emily realizes that her captor is attempting to make her into a living painting, and Emily might not survive the artistic process.
It sounds like the beginning of something supernatural, and could have indeed developed in that direction, but instead, Malerman keeps his horrors human, intimate, and strange, creating something more akin to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo with his tale of strange obsession. The time we spend in Emily’s head, as she reckons with the situation and searches for a way out, is incredibly engrossing, because Malerman is able to consistently and relatably project the sheer weirdness of the situation out through the pages. What does it mean to be someone else’s work of art, to lose all sense of control and identity as the threat of violence and loss of dignity closes in on you from all sides?
This is Emily’s journey, and the decisions she makes along the way inform who she is in much the same way that Paul Sheldon’s decisions in Stephen King’s Misery inform who he is. It’s remarkable hostage horror, with a wonderful metaphorical exploration layered throughout.
Where the book stumbles for me – and only slightly – is in the bifurcation of the narrative. It’s perhaps necessary to the plot that we spend time in the heads of other characters, to fill in the gaps in the timeline and create a bigger picture that allows for a resolution, but whenever Malerman leaves Emily, it feels like the book loses something, if only for a moment. It’s not that there’s nothing interesting there, or that it feels contrived. It’s just that I was so completely swept up in the single-POV, locked-room narrative of Emily’s story that I felt frustrated by the book’s departures.
But even these departures retain Malerman’s uncanny knack for charting the rising and falling of emotional tension inside the heads of his characters. When we’re frightened, or confused, or both, we have a tendency to free associate, to seek out meaning in things that don’t quite make sense, because we have to have something to create a psychological foothold. Malerman understands this innately, and when he navigates Emily’s confused captive state or Jack’s attempts to play amateur detective, he does so with a firm grasp on the human capacity to fixate, to intellectually wrestle, to pick at details until they produce meaning.
That’s especially important for a book like Pictures of You, a book that delves frequently into the realm of artistic interpretation and creative impulse. Creativity is fuzzy, indistinct, hard to explain even when it’s working well, and Malerman’s efforts to explore that in tandem with a psychological thriller about a woman held hostage pay dividends throughout.
Pictures of You might not rise to the delirious heights of Malerman at his most deliriously imaginative (hello fellow Black Mad Wheel fans), but it does reaffirm his place as a singular voice in modern horror, a mad scientist of subgenres mixing up potions that we can’t wait to devour. I read this book in a single sitting, and I’m betting you’ll be just as happily absorbed into its pages, like a living painting absorbed into an empty frame.
Pictures of You is available as of today, September 8, wherever books are sold.
