Small Towns, Enormous Secrets: A Review of Robert Jackson Bennett’s American Elsewhere

Technically, this is a reread, but it’s a reread with purpose. Robert Jackson Bennett is one of my favorite writers, slipping onto my auto-buy list. The thing is, it wasn’t always that way.

I read The Company Man, and didn’t like it. So then I read Mr. Shivers and didn’t like it. After that, I read The Troupe and almost liked it.

Then I read American Elsewhere and loved it.

American Elsewhere (2013)
Written by: Robert Jackson Bennett
Genre: Horror
Pages: 662 (Trade Paperback)
Publisher: Orbit

The Premise:

Some places are too good to be true.

Under a pink moon, there is a perfect little town not found on any map: Wink, New Mexico.
In that town, there are quiet streets lined with pretty houses, houses that conceal the strangest things.

After a couple years of hard traveling, ex-cop Mona Bright inherits her long-dead mother’s home. And the closer Mona gets to her mother’s past, the more she understands that the people of Wink are very, very different …

SPOILERS AHOY. This is a book from 2013, so kind of fair game. Also content warning for suicides and miscarriages.

Discussion: I have a lot to unpack up front; not least, why did I keep reading works by an author who wrote books whose endings I didn’t like? And why did American Elsewhere work so well for me when his others didn’t?

I kept reading Bennett because he always provided a trifecta of great things: Complex characters. Fully realized settings. Solid writing.

I just didn’t like the stories they wrapped around.

I am not really a horror reader. There are too many horror stories that rely on man’s inhumanity to man and the cruel nature of the world. Too many stories where people go out of their way to be awful. These stories are full of good people struggling and dying, or full of bad people being bad and dying in terrible ways. Pure horror is rarely my jam.

If I’m going to read horror, I want it leavened with something more palatable. Mystery. Adventure. Thriller. It’s why I binge-read Koontz as a teen.

The Troupe tipped closer to dark fantasy, centering on a song that built the world. So even with three books behind me that I didn’t appreciate as much as the writing deserved, I picked up American Elsewhere. I was so glad I did.

American Elsewhere IS a horror story: it’s full of blood and gore and people being horrible to each other for the wrong reasons. It’s full of oppression and despair and people trapped in the ruts they’ve made of their lives. It’s also got a compelling batch of cosmic fantasy — the kind of magic that might just be sufficiently advanced science.

The spoilery gist of this book is that in the past, Coburn Observatory did some experiments with mirror lenses and something observed them right back — a god who was hunting for a world to rehome her enormously powerful and enormously large brood. She dropped them all off in Wink, the manufactured town built around the observatory, gave them three inviolable rules: “Stay here, and wait for me. Each of you should obey the next eldest while I am gone, and you should never harm one another or anything else besides.”  Then she died.

This results in Wink being very weird indeed: not only are there monsters aplenty, Wink is mired in the pop culture of cocktails and green lawns and his and her social roles that Mother thought was appropriate. Some of the people in Wink are real humans, some are only wearing the appearance of human shape, and some are monsters banished to the outskirts for not being able to fit in. On top of all of that, there are fragments of the God-Mother’s body scattered around Wink, slowly changing the landscape.

When Mona arrives in Wink, it’s during a funeral for one of the eldest members of the god-family who has been murdered. The town is stunned. Murdering one of the god-children is impossible for a human to do, and it’s unimaginable for one of the family to have acted in such a way.

At first, the remaining elder members of the family want Mona to leave, sensing that her presence is disruptive, but when there’s a second murder, one of them recruits her to figure out what’s going on.

American Elsewhere is a big thick book which makes room for some petty irritations.

It takes a long time to get Mona mostly up to speed. The reader beats her there, because we get to see scenes that she doesn’t. It gets a little tiring to watch Mona spinning her wheels for the first third of the book. Once she gets Parson (one of the elder siblings) to spin her a “fairy tale” about a family — a very thinly veiled history of their kind — then the story kicks into high gear. Before this moment, Mona’s been stumbling bravely through the dark; afterward, she is still confused but she’s on the right track.

There are a lot of characters here, and some seem to exist to pad out the population. As is the case in many horror stories, they exist only to provide appropriate death counts later. That bugs me, especially when you get to the Grand Guignol climactic act of people suiciding in droves in grossly violent ways. Yeah, thank you for developing all these tiny walk-on roles just so we can see them get slaughtered.

There’s a segment that dragged for me: A story within the story where Mona finds old redacted files about the staff of Coburn Obsevatory. Through these ephemera, she gets to know the people who were working there before Mother came through and tries to piece together the events. Usually, I adore this kind of thing — characters reading documents in a secret lab — but the problem is, none of these characters really matter in the now. Plus the question of what actually has happened was answered for the reader by Parson’s fairy tale. It’s enjoyable enough, but I wanted to get back to the main storyline.

All those irritants aside, this book is really a good read. For a horror novel written by a male writer, I thought it was surprisingly centered on mothers and their children in a really interesting and plausible way.

Mona is a woman who tried to make a life for herself (job, husband, baby) and when it fell apart after a violent accident in which she miscarried, she became a drifter. She’s haunted by her mother’s suicide which occurred while she was very young. Mona only ever knew her as a miserably discontent housewife striving for the perfect home, so she’s stunned to find out that her mother had been part of the cutting-edge experiment that resulted in Wink being the way it is.

There are Big Revelations here in this book, one predictable but delightful, and some that are elegant twists on character development that make you sit back and give a satisfied “ah,” no matter how many times you read the book. That Mona is slightly more than human? Predictable but perfectly used here. The sheer human-relatable core to the mother-god? Or the cause of her mother’s mental illness? A wonderful twist.

I like the god-children. They’re varied immensely and run the gamut from pathetic (yet terrifying) to charismatic and powerful (yet terrifying). Even the ones who masquerade as humans do so in ways that are disconcerting. Not only are they basically parasitical invaders of human flesh, they don’t really behave in human ways, so there’s a constant level of dissonance, a feeling of subtle wrongs.

One of the most fascinating characters is also the most enigmatic — the rejected child named The Wildling — caged, and resentful, but also tragic. I also really liked the First, who was both more alien and more human than many of the others.  The villain of the piece is also the most wounded, and is really nothing more than a child crying out for its mother.

I loved the magic. There’s so much strange and weird that permeates Wink that it becomes a really individual setting. You get Bennett’s description of the physical terrain, but you also get the lingering sense of the uncanny always lurking just out of sight, carefully ignored or covered up for by the locals.

One of the benefits of a big book is that Bennett can include all sorts of things: there’s the horror, the murder mystery, Mona’s quest for her mother’s history, and then there’s the local criminals who get dragged into the godlets’ plans, dealing heroin in exchange for carrying strange, deadly tokens around. It all means Bennett has space to flesh out the world and characters. That makes up for the characters who exist just to die.

In Conclusion: In the end, American Elsewhere is such a satisfying read. It’s got big, world-altering stakes, but they’re based on small, intimate issues, and that’s a lovely combination. Mona’s a great character to guide us through; changed by all these vast events, but still managing to keep her humanity. That said, I’m thrilled that his writing has tipped over to full fantasy — the Divine Cities trilogy is amazing, and the Founders series looks to be just as good — but this one really feels like the book where he hit his stride. It won the 2013 Shirley Jackson Award, so I know I’m not the only one who thinks so. If you’ve missed this one and you like fantasy-laced horror, check it out.