The Binding
3.6/5 I always hate summarizing plots, but I know I should since I rely on reviews, not the blurbs, to tell me what a book is about. So, instead of plagiarizing, or trying to be clever in explaining a complex story without giving anything away, let me quote directly from Goodreads:
Convinced that evil spirits have overtaken his daughter, a desperate father introduces her to Nat Thayer, a young psychiatrist in their sleepy blue-blooded Massachusetts college town. Thayer quickly diagnoses the girl with Cotard Delusion, an obscure condition sometimes described as “walking corpse syndrome.” But Thayer soon realizes his patient—and many of the local families—are actually being targeted by a malignant force resurrected from the town's wicked history. Thayer must discover the source of the spreading plague…before there is no one left to save.
There is a lot happening in The Binding. There are at least major 5 story-lines going (investigation of a coed's murder, creepy autistic/genius kid who is seeing some funky stuff, Nat's relationship with the Cotard's Syndrome patient, the story of the coed's roommate, and the history of the prominent families in town) and the difficulty of keeping all these balls in the air is apparent at several points in the novel. There were occasional moments which suffered from lack of flow and this was particularly apparent in the story-line featuring the town sheriff. Wolff lapses into prose reminiscent of a police procedural and while this is not at all a bad thing, it doesn't gel well with everything else that is going on. Since this isn't really a crime novel, it sits funny and I believe the novel would have been made much better by an editorial decision to either bolster the crime element or abandon it to truly revel in the horror aspect the book flirts with, but ultimately fails, to commit to. In a similar vein, I blame the multiple story-lines for some literary choppiness in both the telling of this tale (it took at least until a third of the way in before the author found his literary groove and the writing became more fluid) and the slapdash-ish character development. There is an especially bizarro turn about two-thirds in when Nat falls for his 18 year-old patient for no apparent reason whatsoever. Unfortunately, without any real sense of Nat, this reads as creepy rather than romantic – or even overtly sexual. I think I could have least gotten behind his crush even if it was minimally motivated by chasing down a pretty young thing. As for the other characters, especially the sheriff, I have no idea what is going on there. (I think the fact I keep calling the sheriff character sheriff, instead of by his real name – John? – demonstrates there is some lack of vividness in flushing out who this guy actually is). What saves this book from the garbage can is the excellent plot – or maybe the ideas underlying the plot. Personally, just discovering such a thing as Cotard's Delusion exists and what it is was reason enough to read the book. But that aside, there were really some nice elements in The Binding and Wolff did a great job tying everything up. What made me a sad panda though was that The Binding is such a perfect example of a book that underperforms. More work, more talent, or more editing could have made The Binding a real contender. Buy, Borrow, or Burn: Borrow.
Thanks go to "Nicholas Wolff" (apparently a nom de plume), Gallery Books, and NetGalley for the advance copy. Want to comment on this review? Check it out on Goodreads!
