SACRIFICIAL ANIMALS, the kind of uneasy horror-inflected thriller I enjoy reading the most

SACRIFICIAL ANIMALS
KAILEE PEDERSEN
St. Martin' s Press
$29.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Inspired by Kailee Pedersen's own journey being adopted from Nanning, China in 1996 and growing up on a farm in Nebraska, this rich and atmospheric supernatural horror debut explores an ancient Chinese mythology.

The last thing Nick Morrow expected to receive was an invitation from his father to return home. When he left rural Nebraska behind, he believed he was leaving everything there, including his abusive father, Carlyle, and the farm that loomed so large in memory, forever.

But neither Nick nor his brother Joshua, disowned for marrying Emilia, a woman of Asian descent, can ignore such summons from their father, who hopes for a deathbed reconciliation. Predictably, Joshua and Carlyle quickly warm to each other while Nick and Emilia are left to their own devices. Nick puts the time to good use and his flirtation with Emilia quickly blooms into romance. Though not long after the affair turns intimate, Nick begins to suspect that Emilia’s interest in him may have sinister, and possibly even ancient, motivations.

Punctuated by scenes from Nick’s adolescent years, when memories of a queer awakening and a shadowy presence stalking the farm altered the trajectory of his life forever, Sacrificial Animals explores the violent legacy of inherited trauma and the total collapse of a family in its wake.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The pleasure I felt reading this book about a bisexual man embroiled in a failing family that's falling to pieces under a culturally unexpected malevolence...! If your mood says, "make it fast," move on to the next cookie-cutter thriller. If your mood says, "give me the literary equivalent of edging," you opened the right book.

The pacing of the read itself is fast. The way the short chapters propel your reading is not, however, equaled by the pace of the story unfolding. The relocation into different periods of time that unfold the wide fan of motives and motivations is much more deliberate. I was surprised by this at first, but in time found my footing in this technique of moving the pages at a different rate from the story itself. In the end, the mechanism I used for dealing with this mismatch was the same one I'd used eons ago when I watched All My Children...the stories moved slower than the episodes.

That said...the story is very familiar. Using this technique helped a Gothic romance-cum-horror tale feel more exciting than that description does. Emilia, the exoticized Other, gets the modern reader's sympathy at first. She's rejected and devalues based on her Otherness. We respond to this behavior nowadays with complete sympathy for the Othered, as goodness only knows it was long past time for us to do as a default.

...but what if that could be used to wreak havoc...?

The author, an ethnic Chinese adoptee into Midwestern culture, decided she would use this very, very clever repurposing of the wide paranoid streak in US culture to create a Gothic story of supernatural entities causing havoc for, apparently, the hell of it. The nine-tailed fox of East Asian folklore seems, more often than not, to just do stuff to see what'll happen next. That seems to me, when attributed to conscious entities, like a wicked, immoral, rotten-souled thing to do, as it is guaranteed to hurt someone who does not know what they're getting into when they fall for the fox-spirit's lures. One can argue that, really basically, Nick fucking his brother's wife for any reason at all is just cause for everything that follows.

I agree.

But everyone else? They didn't ask for this.

So runs my usual horror-themed read response. Like Walschots's Hench, I've always seen super"heroes" as agents of chaos and misery; I watched Poltergeist and asked my then-date, "what the hell are these people gonna do when their insurance won't replace the house?" (He broke up with me a few weeks later.) It doesn't help that I do not believe in The Supernatural, or spirits, or gods. (The vastness of just measurable spacetime isn't awe-inspiring enough for you?) That's one steep hill of disbelief to climb for one little story.

Where I got invested in Author Pedersen's iteration of it was back to that soap-opera technique of unfolding the fan behind the shadowplay of the story. I was constantly thinking "what's that going to mean?" and "what's his zipper doing down?" not focusing on the action in the moment.

For some of y'all, that's the nail in the coffin right there. Good. This will not be a good read for someone whose story in-the-moment expectations are to move from cause to effect and ever onwards, kicked in the hindquarters by heavy boots of Action. A more satisfied reader will come from the ranks of the curious ones who climb hills to look around from the top, then walk down to look at the top.

Satisfying reading, though not in the easy, ordinary way.