Jason Schwartz has written what is essentially a novella-length version of the American Horror Story credit sequence(s): unsettling, choppy, eerie… and yet strangely (and wonderfully) compelling.

The overwhelming majority of this book is comprised of odd images, shattered by other images or thoughts crossing through: a boy with a bird in his throat, a body turned into an object turned into a story, a house in semi-rural Pennsylvania (a land I know well, which also gave me an inside track to the novel in a way) that seems to shift under the reader’s eye. But it is not the house that shifts – you almost come to believe, over the course of the reading, that it is (to be really cliché about it) you who are shifting. There is a tug to Schwartz’s words that I cannot fully explain and it keeps you off balance, the story slipping away from you even as you try to grasp it.

Read the full piece in the The Next Best Book Blog.