Mr. Montessori and his family return home from a trip to the beach to discover that their sofa is different. Once dark and contemporary, it's now antique, green and yellow, and smelling faintly of damp. Its appearance and origins are a mystery. A joke? An inverted theft? A break in the fabric of reality? Yes, the police take the "crime" seriously. But what happens next lies outside their expertise.
A short and eerily effective update on the suburban Gothic genre. Mr. Munson seeds the otherwise ordinary setting with ominously recurring symbols and side characters ... But the story sustains its atmosphere of disquiet by refusing to give away its secrets until the final sentences.
A slow burn ... The plot is simple, yet deceptive ... What Munson lacks in girth, he makes up for in atmosphere ... A 'vibes novel,' one that benefits from the reader giving themself over to its rhythm, mood, and current of unreliability.
The reader is sucked into Montessori’s mind ... Munson keeps the reader hooked on the mystery ... While the mystery is enough to make the short book engrossing, Munson’s narrator invites the reader into the story...with the direct address to the reader ... Surreal, with twists and turns and even diction that is sometimes off-putting enough to feel like an error, so these asides to the reader only add to the edge-of-your-seat appeal to the psychological horror ... [The] language allows the story to evolve quickly enough to suck the reader in, but beautiful enough to quietly blow the reader’s mind ... When the ending hits like a couch dropped from a tenth story building, it feels so abrupt, so immediate that it’s almost a let-down. This is, in part, due to Munson’s delicious and brain-melting prose ... Consuming ... Can be devoured in a sitting or two.
