Bottled Abyss

I went through a period maybe a decade back where I was trying to read all the nominees for the HWA's Bram Stoker best novel award. I've had this one sitting around since then. Yes, I am the kind of person to buy a book because it sounds interesting and then let it sit around for nearly ten years before actually reading it. I read Ethridge's first Novel, Black and Orange, and it didn't grab me the way I was hoping it would, so that's another reason it took me so long to get to this one.

Overall, I feel the same way about this novel that I did about Black and Orange. I wanted it to be better than it actually was. There are some parts of the novel where the tension pushed things forward enough to keep me reading but nothing in it really compelled me. I finished it more out of inertia and a sense of completeism that I just can't seem to shake no matter how much a book is not really working for me. The characters are almost entirely defined by the presence of their own personal tragedies, which is not necessarily a problem if you get enough glimpses of them before those tragedies strike to flush them out and give a deeper sense of how they've been effected. Ethridge doesn't really do this to a sufficient degree though. On top of that this book suffers from the inclusion of several tropes. One of those tropes is just a personal pet peeve of mine, but the other two are things that I think are pretty objectively questionable.

The first trope this books suffers from is the presence of infidelity between the main characters. This is the trope that is a pet peeve of mine. I'm sorry, this is just not fucking compelling or even interesting in most cases. It's annoying to be introduced over and over in literature to characters who have not considered what two people owe one another in a relationship, whether they have communicated their expectations and boundaries adequately, or whether the constraints of the nuclear family fit them or not. Admittedly, I am probably not included in what might be termed the "average reader" or whatever, so this probably still works fine for others.

The second trope, and here's where we get into the openly questionable shit, is the fat equals evil trope. Ethridge has also, a la Stephen King, included a fat character in the story that is essentially a villain. The fact of the character's fatness has no bearing on the character's inhumane actions and is not necessary to the novel. It's just more two century old bullshit about fatness symbolizing greed or whatever. Not only is this an actively off-putting and harmful trope, it also almost always signals an author's inability to separate their personal prejudices from the story they're writing.

The third trope, one that is far too often employed by men writers in particular, is showing how terrible a villain is by showing that villain engaged in sexual violence against a woman. It's made worse in this novel by that woman being a nameless sex worker. The villain in this case does enough other dastardly shit that you'd still be happy when he meets his end. The inclusion of the sexual violence and whorephobia is totally unnecessary.