What’s interesting about the writing is that, mostly embedded within characters’ perspectives, it depends heavily on allusions, many of which are especially poignant given the book’s pervasive nostalgia, which begins with the dedication “For the Class of 1988.” Indeed, readers who didn’t either live through the 80s or see a lot of John Hughes movies will miss a great deal of the culture that West captures both through his narrator’s voice and in the dialogue of his characters, both in a 1988 timeline and in a class reunion timeline ten years later. The regional flavor only appears in spare description and characters’ attitudes, and that craftsmanship is so admirable in part because the buttresses are all but invisible behind lean, easy prose.
My description so far might suggest labored prose, but West’s reads like the opposite. Despite my general efforts as a reader not to anticipate plotlines, I did see the major twists coming–that said, West is courteous enough to deliver twisted plotting with tickle-torturing efficacy, something too often lacking in today’s straightforward subgenre ruts, and his attention to detail is careful enough to merit serious rethinking and rereading in order to admire the narrative elaboration as a product of true craftsmanship rather than cheap trickery. While far from qualifying as extreme horror, The Wide Game delivers some startling (narratively justified) gore that engaged my love of extreme aesthetics, i.e., the side of horror that pushes the boundaries of where art can and should take the imagination. This paragraph is for the part of me who likes the frosted side. As a result, the casual reader who wants fast-paced scares as well as the horror fan who wants substance will find much of value in this reissue of the beginning of West’s Harmony cycle.
In other words, West’s supernatural worlds, like the best we have, flow from the world he knows, not from some new twist on the latest trendy monsters.
The Wide Game is a tense, well-structured page-turner that draws on regional flavor–the fictional town of Harmony in an atmospherically real Indiana–that earns it a place in American horror alongside other regionalists like Stephen King and Bentley Little, not to mention Poe and Lovecraft. For background on The Wide Game and an interview with Michael West, see my author spotlight.
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