Review: "In This Way I Was Saved" by Brian Deeleuw

Although it is early in the year, I think that I may have found the book that was the biggest let down for me, In This Way I Was Save by Brian Deeleuw. It is a book where the distance between what I thought it was going to be and what it actually was too great to ignore. Now I could include the terrible Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close on that list, but really, I walked into that book with really low expectations, and they were shattered. This is not that serious of a case, but it still depresses me that this book is not very good, because I wanted it to be. At least in Foer’s self-indulgence I could find some laughs, here, I was just bored, and that just makes the experience more disappointing. The novel sets itself up like a horror story, we meet these two kids, Daniel and Phil, who meet on a playground, and it is readily apparent that one of them is an imaginary friend to the other. We are introduced into one of the kid’s home lives, where his mother is an eccentric publisher, and we follow these two through their years of adolescence, and toward more glaring acts of depravity. I hope I have not made it sound to exciting, because the action is explained in prose that is laid on too thick that is also not very original. I like the premise, which is a lot like Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and thought it would be a little like Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, which was a literary zombie novel that blended well, here it does not, which makes me sad, because it a cool idea that is not done enough as many other horror tropes
Rating: 2/5