A Review of Carol Goodman’s “The Night Visitors”
A Twisty Road
If you have any interest in social workers and the work that they do, you might be inclined to pick up the latest thriller from Carol Goodman called The Night Visitors. It’s a book about abused women and children — and dysfunctional families in general — and the saints in shining armour who swoop down to protect them from abusive husbands or fathers. There’s a lot of social work in The Night Visitors, so much so that the average reader may want to cry uncle. Still, it is a not bad little yarn with things that go bump in the night when a snowstorm threatens a small town in the Catskills. It starts out very much so in realist mode, but becomes more and more seemingly implausible as it moves along — and almost takes on a supernatural element about halfway into the book. That said, the book is a pretty OK story about redemption at its core, and if you’re a fan of Stephen King, you might say that Carol Goodman is cut from the same cloth — just with more of a feminine angle.
The book is told from the viewpoints of two characters in alternating chapters: Alice and Mattie. Alice is a young woman on the run from an abusive husband that she may have killed (or did she?) with her young son (or is he?) Oren, a 10-year-old with a touch of Asperger’s Syndrome and a penchant for all things Star Wars (well, except that the book dares not mention the horrible prequels). They arrive by bus in Delphi, New York, where they are promised safe and secure shelter. A middle-aged social worker named Mattie takes them on, but — breaking from protocol — invites them into her home for a stay. With a nasty and terrible winter snowstorm on the way, the three are shutter bound in Mattie’s very large house, which was her parent’s house until they died in rather strange circumstances along with her younger brother (or was he really her brother?) Caleb (carbon monoxide poisoning, anyone?).
Basically, this is a novel that serves up a whole whack of red herrings, and the plot twists and turns and goes into places that readers might not expect. This has a two-pronged effect: it keeps you on your toes to be sure, but it also means that the novel gets sillier and sillier as it goes along as the thread unravels and unravels. It becomes incredulous that some characters are harbouring certain decades-long secrets for one thing. For another, things happen because the plot tells them to, but then they’re never brought up again. For instance, and this might be a mild spoiler, the town Sherriff warns Mattie fairly early on to be on the lookout for Alice and Oren (while already in her custody, so to speak) as they are in danger for no particular reason. He never brings up why he thought they were in danger — particularly when it appears from the telling of the tale that the main threat, the abusive husband/father, is no longer in the land of the living. True, this is a novel about how the characters perceive things that may be not as they seem — hinging on unpredictable plot twists to carry momentum. Still, things happen and they aren’t readily explained because the plot is rushing off to the next raging forest fire that’s taking place in the character’s lives.
Basically, what starts out as a thriller that’s grounded in the realistic early on becomes more and more fabulist. Characters appear where they seem to have no right to, and they happen to know a lot more about what’s really going on than they probably should when they do arrive. It’s really too bad, because The Night Visitors had the makings, in part, of a really plausible story about domestic assault and the effort people will go to escape it. What the novel eventually turns into is a sopping wet puddle of a book that is spooky, yes, but totally unbelievable. And what’s particularly damning is that things go unexplained and certain characters go missing for large parts of the book. For instance, we get the sense that Oren has some kind of special power to connect with the dead, but the book never really reveals how or why this happens. It’s just simply a given that even some of the main characters, such as Alice, can’t explain. It’s a weak convenience for the sake of adding shade to a dark story about the ghosts of the past, and it’s absolutely frustrating as a plot device.
All that said, The Night Visitors is not a bad read. Yes, it is a novel with some possibility and could have been so much better if it had stayed more grounded in the realistic. That said, if you’re looking for a fun read and have a hankering to be a wannabe social worker, well, this book will satisfy. I suppose most people will come to this tale looking for a little light diversion, of which the book succeeds at being. And yet … it could have been so much more. There could have been a real sense of palpable danger to the proceedings, which evaporates when certain characters arrive on the scene in record-breaking time. At this point, the book just becomes, well, mindless. So, this is an entertaining book to be sure, but with a sturdier hand at being grim and dead serious and not light-headed fluff, The Night Visitors could have been a whale of a tale that reached gritty, kitchen-sink realistic heights.
To conclude, the book is enjoyable. However, if you’re looking for something genuinely creepy as far as thrillers go, you could do no worse on the domestic abuse front than reading Araminta Hall’s Our Kind of Cruelty, even though that book is somewhat flawed, too. Perhaps the great domestic abuse thriller that is literary as well as pulse inducing still has to be written. All that The Night Visitors does is give readers a sense of what’s potentially capable and little more. It’s too bad, because there’s a serious novel waiting to break out of this book about social workers finding redemption at rescuing mothers and sons. It doesn’t happen, leaving The Night Visitors to be just a little bit of a squandered opportunity, as fun as it can be.
Carol Goodman’s The Night Visitors will be published by William Morrow Paperbacks on March 26, 2019.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com.
