The End of Alice by A. M. Holmes disappointed me. Because of all the warnings, I was expecting to be horrified, grossed out and disgusted. At a minimum I knew I'd wind up throwing the book across the room and suffering from nightmares for at least a week. Instead, I was—dare I admit it?—bored. Alas, I am forced to admit I'm apparently devoid of human feeling. I am at best a robot, at worst a psychopath.
Such discoveries about myself, however, did force me to come up with reasons why the book didn't affect me. I mean I can be moved by horror in books. I remember reading an account of the heath murders that took place outside of London in the 1960s and being afraid of what the next page would reveal. Does that experience mean I can respond emotionally only to nonfiction? I don't think so. Harlan Ellison in Deathbird and Other Stories has a character looking out a window when some sort of monster does "an unspeakable act." The phrase appalled me. In Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot when a mother and father finished drinking their baby's blood and tossed the body aside, I almost stopped reading. What gives?
I've now been pondering my lack of disgust with The End of Alice for around twelve hours, and I've come up with three explanations.
1) Ellison's "unspeakable act" left the specifics to my imagination. A. M. Holmes spells out every horrific thing the narrator does. Had some things been implied rather than told, I think the book would have troubled me more.
2) I identified with absolutely no one in Alice; thus I had no emotionally involvement. In the book on the heath murders, two unsuspecting young adults are lured into a terrifying situation. I'm usually unsuspecting. I could identify with those "kids." With Alice I couldn't connect with either the pedophile who molested Alice or with the college coed who took delight in molesting young boys. (I'm phrasing that carefully so if anyone is interested in reading Alice, I won't be giving away a major plot device.)
3) The third problem was that I found the writing to be pretentious. The King example mentioned above worked because the writer presented the event in clearly written prose. He didn't couch it with clever alliteration, nor did he tell me how horrible the event was. If he had, I would have lost interest—as I frequently did during Alice.
I will grant that the overall structure of the plot was interesting, particularly in an academic, aren't-I-clever sort of way. In a similar vein, I found the author's choice of the name Alice interesting in light of the argument claiming that Lewis Carroll might have been a pedophile.
Final analysis: I'm sorry Alice didn't turn me into a basket-case. Maybe the next book will. I'm nothing if not ever hopeful.
