PositiveGawkerThe question of what precisely it is you’re reading lingers at various points, and no sooner do you find your bearing within the text than Darnielle re-angles the mirrors once again, reorienting everything that has come before. After a formally conventional if unsettling opening section narrated by Gage, the novel splits wide open into a series of paired sections, each one in the first half corresponding to one in the back half that complicates what we’ve previously read ... That some type of truth can be found in a lie or vice versa is far from a novel observation, but Darnielle’s skillfully refracted presentation of these ideas is as worth sticking around for as the tender and tragic stories that reveal themselves within his house of mirrors.
