AN ORDINARY VIOLENCE by Adriana Chartrand (2023)
★ ★ ★ - a really (arguably, *too*?) subtle literary cosmic horror story about disconnection, isolation, siblinghood, Seeing, & making sense out of the ordinary horror in our day-to-day lives…
“Three missing women. Three people out there responsible for making them disappear.
For everyone damaged, a damager.
…It’s hard to calculate this grim mathematics, with time being the only reliable measure of its true extent. Survey the debris from across an expanse of years, and only then can you begin to quantify the pain, to see everything it took from you. Step back even further, and the destruction can last for generations.”
title: An Ordinary Violence
author: Adriana Chartrand
published: 2023
publisher: House of Anansi Press
genre/subgenre: literary cosmic horror
setting: Toronto & northern so-called Canada, in the winter mostly but it does cycle through the seasons a bit
main themes/subjects: creepy jackrabbit, hallucinations & visions, nightmares & sleep-walking, escaping your hometown, a sibling in prison, memory & imagining, hope, stories, children & childhood /siblinghood, influences & support, anger & power, self-control, Seeing
representation: Indigenous MC & author
tropes: void, portal cosmic horror, ghosts /haunting
“If he was remembered at all, the man would quickly become something other than a man. A beast, a monster, a devil, but the names would all mean the same thing—not human. Not just not like us, but not of us. In other words: not our problem. An abhorrent anomaly that couldn’t have been foreseen. Unfixable, so why bother trying? Best not to look at it too closely.
What was so confounding about the fact of an ordinary man’s violence? So many people needed monsters to look monstrous. They couldn’t accept, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the demons looked just like them. That a seemingly regular life could conceal a deeply vicious soul.”
my thoughts:
I didn’t really get this one. Some folks in our bookclub chat mentioned that part of the point of this book was for it not to have any real satisfactory answers because that’s the point of how the horror & the ordinary overlap both in the book & in “real life” but as another reader pointed out, even books like that tend to have some kind of resolution feeling, in that they “give something” to their reader to signify cohesion to some degree & the reader who pointed this out—& I feel the same way—just didn’t get that feeling from this book.
I very much enjoyed our bookclub discussion of this book, however. I feel like the group was fairly split in that half liked it, half either didn’t like it or didn’t get it & didn’t like that they didn’t get it (🙋🏻) so it was really cool to hear everyone’s very different perspective & their thoughts on what they thought was going on in the book & why it was written the way it was.
i would recommend this book to readers who enjoy weird sort of literary cosmic horror with no clear plot or resolution & are good at reading deeply enough to pull meaning out of the void. this book is best read… slowly, maybe? I kind of binged it & maybe that wasn’t the smart thing to do? Like it pulls you along but it doesn’t reward you so… idk. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“Absurd to be afraid of a rabbit, she tries to tell herself. But deep down, in the place where her dreams come from, she knows it’s not really a rabbit.
Something’s building—something’s coming. The nauseating cold knowing envelops her. It’s coming and it’s going to get her.”
final note: I initially gave this book ★ ★ but if it had had what I felt it was lacking then it could have been a 4-5 ★ so I bumped it up to ★ ★ ★ instead but… I feel like that’s generous.
CW // death of a parent (cancer), depression, grief, body horror, cheating, gore, violence (knife), domestic violence
season: winter
music pairing: radio static or sounds of deep space
further reading:
“We live in an actively colonial society still—it’s not in the past.”: A Conversation with Adriana Chartrand on “An Ordinary Violence” by Monika Dziamka for Chicago Review of Books (Oct 2023) —one of our bookclub members shared this link in our chat & it was very helpful in giving me some orientation in the conception & intent behind the book. I loved the interview but I wish I had just gotten more of that directly from the book itself.
AND THEN SHE FELL by Alicia Elliott (2023)
the Convergence Saga by Cadwell Turnbull
NO GODS, NO MONSTERS (2021) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
WE ARE THE CRISIS (2023) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
MAN MADE MONSTERS by Andrea L Rogers (2022) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
WHAT MOVES THE DEAD by T Kingfisher (2022) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
THE BALLAD OF BLACK TOM by Victor LaValle (2016)
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