They’ll Get You by Mark Pellegrini. 431 pages.
Mark Pellegrini is best known for his comic books, especially the sleeper hit Kamen America, which I’ll probably discuss here eventually since it makes overt references to Sailor Moon. But he also writes horror, so in honor of Spooky Month, let’s take a look at his indie horror novel They’ll Get You, published just last year. Although flawed—and in need of a good editor—They’ll Get You has what it takes to keep you awake at night.
Synopsis
The novel has a deceptively simple premise, though Pellegrini milks it for all it’s worth. The protagonist is ten-year-old Kevin. He lives in a quiet suburban neighborhood and attends an elementary school, but from the first few pages, it’s apparent that something is wrong with his town. The children in his class are the only ones in the school, perhaps in the entire suburb, though the other classes have teachers who lecture to empty rooms. Several houses on the route to and from his school have something wrong with them: There’s a mansion overgrown with creeping vegetation, where an elderly woman perpetually screams for help from an attic window while the vines gradually close in on her. Behind Kevin’s house is a dilapidated building missing one wall, but the tarp hanging where that wall should be has ragged holes in it that look like a face, and its eyes follow Kevin when he plays in the backyard. Kevin’s mother is possibly a ghost or maybe an automaton; she almost never speaks, and she seems to whisper out of existence whenever she leaves Kevin’s sight.
Kevin’s already weird life gets weirder when, on a dare, he climbs into a corrugated drainpipe and gets attacked by a ravenous, half-eaten corpse. After he escapes, one of his friends disappears from existence and even from Kevin’s memory. Then Kevin finds himself under attack by an endless and inventive variety of monsters, all of whom are bent on dragging him to an abandoned supermarket with darkened windows, where invisible workmen cut up children with jigsaws. And Kevin is not the only one they want: Although the other kids in his class are afraid to talk about it, all of them are hunted, and the monsters are picking them off one by one.
Commentary
The story consists mostly of a series of action vignettes: Kevin goes somewhere he shouldn’t or does something inadvisable, or else the town’s robot-like inhabitants force him into a dangerous situation; then a monster attacks, and he barely escapes, battered and bloody but still alive. At first, his home is a sanctuary, and his mother’s presence seems able to dispel the monsters instantly, but then the monsters invade the house, and as his mother becomes more distant and ghostly, his sanctuary grows smaller and smaller, reduced to a single room besieged on all sides.
The monsters come in endless varieties, so the action sequences are less repetitive than they might have been. Pellegrini usually mentions each of the town’s traps and forbidding spots at least a hundred pages before Kevin has to deal with them directly, and this use of foreshadowing makes the plot seem more tightly structured than it actually is.
Nonetheless, some of the elements, despite the given explanations, strain credulity. It’s unlikely that a ten-year-old, even a tough and athletic one (which Kevin, Pellegrini tells us repeatedly, isn’t), would be able to fight off all the horrors that are after him. It’s clear the monsters are toying with him, that they don’t actually want to seize him right away but instead drag out the fear and torment, but some of the action sequences are still difficult to swallow.
Criticism
This book is self-published and, alas, it shows. Pellegrini very much needed to hire a line editor. Clunky, wordy sentences abound, as do typos. He uses excessive passive voice, writing sentences such as “A mistake had been made” instead of “Kevin made a mistake.” And most distractingly, he uses several words incorrectly, writing digits when he means joints and noisome when he means noisy. A lot of the mistakes are first-pass things, stuff Pellegrini should have caught himself, but a good editor could undoubtedly have tightened the prose. As it stands, this book reads like a middle draft, not yet ready for prime time.
Tighter prose might also have served to reduce the book’s length. Once I got into the story and figured out its gimmick, I got concerned about the page count: 431 pages is a lot to describe a little kid battling monsters repeatedly by his lonesome. Nonetheless, Pellegrini has a real talent for tension, so the spine-tingles never entirely disappear despite the length. But the book is still a hundred pages too long, at least. About three-quarters of the way through, Kevin attempts to sneak out of this hellish town; that effort is easily the book’s best sequence, and it should have been the climax. If I were Pellegrini’s editor, I’d suggest attaching the conclusion to the end of that sequence and chopping out everything that originally came between.
Also, the story repeatedly forces Kevin to hold the idiot ball: For example, he is at one point running from a villain who might have walked out of a slasher movie, an enormous man who wears a burlap sack over his head and wants to feed Kevin to a herd of ravenous pigs. Kevin, in the midst of his terrified flight, suddenly stops and forgets his mortal danger because he finds a shop selling candy. Although it’s clear from the beginning that the forces running the town have done something to Kevin’s mind, so his memory isn’t working properly, these moments of rank stupidity are still frustrating.
And that may be the book’s central weakness. Kevin, Pellegrini reminds us repeatedly, is shallow and unheroic even for a ten-year-old, having few ambitions and no interests aside from television. It’s tough to spend over 400 pages with a protagonist like that. As I read They’ll Get You, I often thought that an expansion of the central cast might improve it. Kevin, despite his impressive, indeed superhuman, ability to evade or fight off eldritch abominations, is not interesting enough. At one point, Pellegrini teases us with the possibility that he might get an unexpected ally, someone who has been facing the same horrors he has and, like him, is willing to acknowledge them. The conclusion of that particular sequence is one of the book’s biggest disappointments.
Final Comments
Like the best of supernatural horror, They’ll Get You offers a lot of hints and suggestions but little in the way of explanation. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine an explanation that could tie together all the book’s bizarre, surreal goings-on without being a disappointment. A few possibilities present themselves from the beginning: Kevin is dreaming, or it’s all a simulation, or he’s in purgatory or hell. Each of these would have been a letdown. When the book at last arrives at its final scene after having battered the reader almost as much as the protagonist, it delivers a partial explanation that is as satisfying as any could be. But the why of the story isn’t really important; it’s the atmosphere, with its weirdness and sense of dread, that really matters. On that, They’ll Get You delivers in spite of its shortcomings.
I really enjoyed this. It offers all the scares it should, and when reading it late at night, I was genuinely rattled. Walking around my neighborhood, I found myself looking for the eccentricities, traps, and wrongness that Pellegrini describes. This is a book that can get under your skin and make your teeth rattle, and that’s all we can ask of a horror novel.
