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A review by chrisbiss
Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram
1.0
This was a massive disappointment.
Stories about 'otherspaces' and weird liminal places are among my favourites, whether that's *House of Leaves* or Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood. The fact that this also promised some choose your own adventure/branching path stuff made it doubly interesting to me. Unfortunately it's a complete failure to launch.
The main problem here is entirely in the tone of the thing. The main character's narration is abrasive in a really off-putting way, and he's supremely unlikeable. He's edgy and cocky without ever being funny, talking in a very disaffected, jaded way as though he thinks he's super cool. Both the narrator and the one other speaking character - a woman who is never actually named, identified only by the clothes she wears despite spending days with the main character - sound the same, and it reminds me of the way Redditors imagine cool people speak. It's like the worst parts of Johnny Truant's narration in *House of Leaves* but without any of the humour.
This would be a problem on its own, but it's compounded by the fact that this is a horror novel and we're meant to believe that this narrator is both suicidally depressed and scared out of his mind. He certainly spends a lot of time telling us that both of those things are true, but I never believed it for a second. I think fear can be hard to convey well in a first person narrative anyway, perhaps intuitively. First person promises to get us closer to the thoughts and feelings of a character, but fear creates irrationality and narration largely requires a rational mind. So by the time a character can tell us about the fear they're feeling its been diluted and muted, and it doesn't land. People like to laud "show don't tell" as a truth of writing when it isn't, but I think it's true of writing fear - and first person perspectives are largely "tell". Especially this one, which never spends any time to delve into the interiority of its character. Despite being firmly in his head for the whole novel I never got a sense of who he was as a person. There's no emotional core to this novella about suicide.
The horror itself is also very Reddit, to the extent that at one point the character plays the Elevator Game (a daft urban legend about haunted lifts that was turned into a film in 2023 and that very much reads like something posted to r/nosleep). This section is a massive tonal shift into absurdism that simply doesn't land.
By the time the narrator gives up and hands control over to the reader and it turns into a CYOA book I was ready to check out, and if the book had been longer than it is I would have DNFd. O didn't care about the character or the events being depicted enough to want to pick the direction the narrative goes in, I just wanted it to be done. And then when I chose the "you decide your own fate" option I was met with this:
Stories about 'otherspaces' and weird liminal places are among my favourites, whether that's *House of Leaves* or Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood. The fact that this also promised some choose your own adventure/branching path stuff made it doubly interesting to me. Unfortunately it's a complete failure to launch.
The main problem here is entirely in the tone of the thing. The main character's narration is abrasive in a really off-putting way, and he's supremely unlikeable. He's edgy and cocky without ever being funny, talking in a very disaffected, jaded way as though he thinks he's super cool. Both the narrator and the one other speaking character - a woman who is never actually named, identified only by the clothes she wears despite spending days with the main character - sound the same, and it reminds me of the way Redditors imagine cool people speak. It's like the worst parts of Johnny Truant's narration in *House of Leaves* but without any of the humour.
This would be a problem on its own, but it's compounded by the fact that this is a horror novel and we're meant to believe that this narrator is both suicidally depressed and scared out of his mind. He certainly spends a lot of time telling us that both of those things are true, but I never believed it for a second. I think fear can be hard to convey well in a first person narrative anyway, perhaps intuitively. First person promises to get us closer to the thoughts and feelings of a character, but fear creates irrationality and narration largely requires a rational mind. So by the time a character can tell us about the fear they're feeling its been diluted and muted, and it doesn't land. People like to laud "show don't tell" as a truth of writing when it isn't, but I think it's true of writing fear - and first person perspectives are largely "tell". Especially this one, which never spends any time to delve into the interiority of its character. Despite being firmly in his head for the whole novel I never got a sense of who he was as a person. There's no emotional core to this novella about suicide.
The horror itself is also very Reddit, to the extent that at one point the character plays the Elevator Game (a daft urban legend about haunted lifts that was turned into a film in 2023 and that very much reads like something posted to r/nosleep). This section is a massive tonal shift into absurdism that simply doesn't land.
By the time the narrator gives up and hands control over to the reader and it turns into a CYOA book I was ready to check out, and if the book had been longer than it is I would have DNFd. O didn't care about the character or the events being depicted enough to want to pick the direction the narrative goes in, I just wanted it to be done. And then when I chose the "you decide your own fate" option I was met with this:
YOU WANT ME TO choose? Me? What gives you the right? I told you I don’t want to be here anymore. Isn’t it obvious? Isn’t it all so glaringly fucking obvious? You want me to choose? You want me to choose love? Just tell me what you want. Use the words. Tell me what you want to see; I’ll say and do whatever you want me to do. Why? Why do you care? You can’t change how it ends. The story’s in your hands. No, it’s literally in your hands. When this thing gets published, my ending will already have been written. You choosing and me choosing doesn’t change a goddamn thing.
This is so off-putting. I actively hate this.
This begins the choose your own adventure section and I'm just glad it was short. It's not well done, lurching from section to section without them feeling like they connect properly, and when the path I'd chosen finally ended it felt completely meaningless. I'm also mildly annoyed that after deciding to persevere with the book I don't feel like I've actually finished it, because I haven't read all of the choices at the end. But I'm not going to go back and choose other options, because I hated this so much that now that I'm done with it I absolutely don't have any desire to go back and spend more time inside it just to find out what the other endings are.
I'll have forgotten about this book by tomorrow.