...a multi-layered hybrid of a novel strengthened by several different bloodlines ... In some ways The Blinds resembles M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, with layers of mystery enfolding the town and its history that are only gradually revealed. Also like Shyamalan’s movie are the many rapid-fire and bizarre plot twists that come at the end. On a deeper level, The Blinds is a novel that asks interesting questions about how our memories make us who we are ... These philosophical questions are secondary, however, to the busy, action-filled plot. The Blinds is first and foremost a fun read, or really about half-a-dozen reads rolled together in one.
...a critique of our best-intentioned it-takes-a-village sentiments that’s both more realistic and more weaponized than similar treatments ... The premise of The Blinds is so intriguing that you don’t dwell too much on that erasing-memories business, even though it’s the most volatile material you can pick up at the Hubristic Tropes Store ... the implications of the concept get a little messy in the telling in the closing chapters ... But Sternbergh sells the basic point: We mess with our psyches at our peril, and one way we mess with our psyches is persuading ourselves that we’re just a few regulations away from maintaining order.
Sternbergh’s characters are intriguing, his plot is suspenseful and his outlook is endearingly dark ... For Sternbergh, just about all our minds are guilty and thus potentially fascinating, if not homicidal. Readers who share his dim view of humankind can embrace The Blinds as naughty fun, but it can also be viewed as a meditation on the ubiquity of evil. Read it and weep. Or laugh. Or both. Sternbergh is an original, grandly irreverent writer.
In The Blinds’ hard-boiled narrative, Sternbergh delivers cutting humor and devastating violence that shows little regard for readers of delicate sensitivities. He fashions intriguing characters out of amnesiacs who are afraid to remember past misdeeds ... What’s more, The Blinds questions the connection of character and fate. It plumbs the inescapability of pasts too horrifying to face with a resonance reminiscent of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, but Sternbergh conveys a violent, bracing immediacy that Hardy never achieves. The Blinds ponders the question of whether a well-intentioned present can be separated from an unforgivable past.
The Blinds is, like Westworld, a sci-fi Western thriller, equally wily in its vision, but it crackles with noir-ish delights, thanks to the author’s flinty wit and a cast of indelible miscreants and psychopaths ... Sternbergh writes a beautiful sentence, even when the subject is mayhem, and he has a talent for lean, propulsive plotting. There are obvious issues of identity and loss, but The Blinds also posits a theory, one many of us increasingly entertain: What if the only way to be truly safe—or happy—is to leave the modern world far behind?
Cleverly improvising on the chord changes common to classic westerns (especially High Noon) and evoking the locked-room horror of Jim Thompson’s The Getaway, Sternbergh shows again why he is one of the most inventive thriller writers working today.
It’s a clever premise, but the many contrivances that support the plot don’t hold up as the novel moves briskly toward its conclusion, whose twists are telegraphed a little too clearly to preserve the element of surprise.
Every time the reader thinks this story’s turning right, it takes a hard left. But it never wanders in circles, and it does move like a championship stock car toward a climax that, however shattering, implies there’s more to come.
