The Grimmer

Set in 1996, The Grimmer features a 15-year-old boy, Vish, who is caught up in a ghoulish crisis. It’s told in his point of view through third person, and it’s squarely in the magic/thriller/horror genre.

Unfortunately, it’s weighed down by its attempt at originality. The author over-ambitiously combines scary incidents and gross monsters with time travel, physics, math, magic, exorcism and rules of engagement that are likely to confound any reader, let alone middle grade or young adult thriller fans.

On the one hand, it’s great that several of the key characters are “brown”; readers of colour will appreciate some of the nuances and plot aspects associated with that. The book is also undeniably unusual in its complex plot, and there are times the writing engages and includes humour, especially where cats are involved.

It might have gotten worse if Buddy hadn’t appeared from the kitchen and started to weave between Agastya and then Danny’s feet. It is impossible to have a fistfight if there is a cat winding around your ankles, both for reasons of balance and because it makes you feel ridiculous to make a fist when a cat is rubbing its head on your shin.

Though The Grimmer’s less scary than your average horror novel, there’s plenty of nail-biting tension, frightful moments and horrifying happenings.

“Dissolve the body,” Gisela muttered, stepping over Vish’s chest. He looked at where the back of her head, with its dark brown hair and paper-white parting, used to be: now it was just air, and the strangely fleshy but lifeless back of that blue mask that floated in front of what used to be her face.

Mr. Farris’s head was still backward, the empty white mask drooping over the loose flesh beneath it as the body kept staggering toward Matt. Matt kept typing as Farris’s melting green hand clamped gently onto his shoulder. Vish could see the slippery fingers trying to close into a gripping claw.

There’s plenty of realistic dialogue, and the pace is mostly good, though both get bogged down by extraneous detail. Language is appropriate for its audience, and the characters and plot are as believable as horror allows. One does come to care about them!

But overall, there are a few too many unlikely coincidences that don’t contribute anything to the storyline (example: two characters both have a habit of hiding chocolate mints), overwriting, bland passages, telling-not-showing, misplaced modifiers and forced or hokey action. The subplots (family issues) don’t gel super well with the all-over-the-place magic/horror plot, and the attempt to reflect the late 1990s (videotapes, oldie bands, Hardy Boy mentions, etc.) doesn’t particularly add interest. There’s also Vish’s crush on a witch that goes nowhere.

But the biggest problems throughout the book are the laborious “asides” of off-beat detail that have nothing to do with (and continually interrupt) the flow.

For instance, immediately following a heavy father/son talk:

“I do. I do forgive you,” Vish had said, then gotten out of the car and fed the meter while his dad sat still in the car for another two minutes. Vish didn’t turn back to look at him, but went into the café alone and asked for a table for two. His dad had joined him, and described Akira Kurosawa movies that Vish hadn’t seen for the next half-hour. Vish thought that the car chat had left him too nervous to enjoy the pastry, but it was still delicious, sweet and rich with butter, with the light dissolving crunch of sugared coconut.

And an unimportant character who hardly appears again:

“Are you guys playing the Mini-Pops Talent Show when school starts again?” Cynthia said. There was nothing mean in her tone, Vish noticed. Cynthia was a year away from finishing high school. She was lined up for a volleyball scholarship, had ideal blonde hair but usually wore her hoodies up unless she was specifically dressed up for something, and years ago Vish had seen her crying out of frustration while her dad tried to walk her through an algebra problem. Now, she had a fake California accent and colorful elastics on her braces, wore mostly Hilfiger and despite the algebra thing, had won the Top Student of the Year award at KSS for three years running. She was also really nice, as evidenced by her coming to pick her brothers up.

This kind of detail in most novels implies information the reader should register because it will prove significant in later action. But early on in this novel, one figures out they are simply distracting asides – and appear on almost every page. It slows things down and frustrates.

As mentioned, there’s also the super-complicated plot which conjures up a bizarre mix of trickery and horror: witches, a vampire-like “nachzehrer”, portals, a lake charged with magic, a golden coin, an amulet, body possession, a grimoire (book of spells), a lunar node, the Nine Spheres, special cat powers and – to top it off – gaps in space, time and matter where an evil force “crammed the dying essence of a lot of people.” Along the way, the reader is supposed to absorb all the rules of this mysterious world.

“The science of magic lets us control it, but if a witch isn’t using raw magic, it will use her or him.”

“You’re part of this. You’ve arrived at a moment in time and place in the world that Isla, Agastya, me and a very bad force have converged upon.”

“Mr. Farris …is a collection of 12,506 long-dead people. People who made a very wicked deal with Mr. Farris because they wanted to live forever. And now they do, trapped inside this body he made out of their bodies: he ate a little piece of each of these people to capture them, and now they live within him.”

“Mr. Farris needs an enormous amount of energy to accomplish what he promised those 12,000 souls over the years: new lives in new bodies. And it’s not the kind of power he can generate himself. It’s the kind that boils out of the core of this planet and others, the heat that life came from a long time ago.”

“The illusion is solid enough now that there’s no evaporating it. That’s what happens in every moment between sleight-of-hand or illusionism and real magic, Vish. There’s a slippage, a zone where reality can be changed.”

Mr. Farris: “Remember that possession is a privilege. The people who have joined me are part of an eternal energy, a piece of the universe that is closer to the infinite than any human could be. Binding with me across the centuries is the greatest gift that any human could ask for, next to the new body that I’ve promised each of my little morsels.”

So, anyone who can navigate the overall structure of the plot and loves frightening ogres and complicated dark magic may well enjoy this. Personally, I found it lacking.