Anybody Home?
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
What came first, the home or the desire to invade?
A seasoned invader with multiple home invasions under their belt recounts their dark victories while offering tutelage to a new generation of ambitious home invaders eager to make their mark on the annals of criminal history. From initial canvasing to home entry, the reader is complicit in every strangling and shattered window. The fear is inescapable.
Examining the sanctuary of the home and one of the horror genre's most frightening tropes, Anybody Home? points the camera lens onto the quiet suburbs and its unsuspecting abodes, any of which are potential stages for an invader ambitious enough to make it the scene of the next big crime sensation. Who knows? Their performance just might make it to the silver screen.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With this literary cross between Funny Games and Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, PW reviewer Seidlinger (My Pet Serial Killer) meditates on home invasion horror from the invaders' point of view. Via direct address from a seasoned home invader, the reader is cast as an amateur in the trade who's in the process of planning their first home invasion. This creepy apprenticeship grows into a voyeuristic game of cat and mouse between the invaders and the family unlucky enough to be chosen, all performed for the gaze of a mysterious cult. The narrator spends a good chunk of the narrative reciting horror platitudes about the nature of fear and the theater of death, and rather than subverting or deconstructing this well-used machinery, things tend to settle into monotony, especially for horror fans already familiar with these tropes. Once the violence begins in earnest, however, Seidlinger pulls no punches in delivering gut-wrenching horror as he drives the novel to its bloody conclusion. Fans of Jack Ketchum and Samantha Kolesnik will want to check this out.
