Book Review : Michael J. Seidlinger - Anybody Home? (2022)
A home invasion is the most terrifying ordeal that can happen to someone, south of being visited by ghosts or targeted by a Satanic cult. It’s such a fucking ghastly idea that a lot of people don’t even want to think about it. Our safe haven being broken into by malevolent strangers engaging us into an unfair confrontation. It’s the type of ordeal that simply can’t happen until it does. It’s even distressing to watch or hear about. I mean, is there anyone of you who truly, truly liked Michael Haneke’s Funny Games?
Right. I’d be fucked up if you did.
American author Michael J. Seidlinger tried his hand at exploring (or at least fictionalizing) this all-too-real phenomenon in his upcoming novel Anybody Home? and it’s as terrifying as you might think. But also unexpectedly human and tragic.
Anybody Home? is literally narrated by the man who wasn’t there. It’s really difficult to understand who he is and what he does within the first hundred pages, but the only thing you need to know is that he’s coordinating a home invasion. Using dehumanizing language (Invader #1, Invader Two, Victim #4, etc), he walks us through the ordeal step-by-step with unexpected development and all with an unnerving calmness. Along with him, we explore not only the specifics of a gratuitous home invasion, but also the dynamics of confrontation and survival.
The American Home as a Battlefield
Michael J. Seidlinger is a bit of a quirky pleasure. I’d forgotten over the years, but he has a very peculiar writing style that makes it sometimes difficult to become emotionally invested in his writing. Not impossible, though. It just demands you to play a more active part in your reading experience. Anybody Home? was definitely a challenge in that regard because it’s not narrated from the point of view of an invader or even a victim. From what I understood the narrator (who calls himself a director) operates from a distance, like some kind of coordinating maestro. You’re not reading a story, you’re reading someone’s account of a story. The director is a metafictional unreliable narrator, which is some kind of a mindfuck.
But Anybody Home? really came to life when I realized that the family under siege were the most interesting characters and this happens when the invaders try to strategically break the father’s will and it doesn’t work. Until then predictable and methodical like a well-rehearsed military operation, the novel takes on a life of its own. When things don’t go according to the plan, it’s where people’s personalities begin to emerge. The dad (who was being a miserable bastard up to that point) discovers he’s got somewhat of a fighter’s streak in him.
Anybody Home? is very much a horror novel, but it is also sneakily a deconstruction of traditional American values. Whichever of them are worth fighting for, whichever of them aren’t and whatnot. Because when you remove someone’s feeling of safety from under them, their immediate priorities surface in the Maslow-ian sense of the term. Whatever’s worth fighting for becomes self-evident and values like monogamy, patriarchy and any judeo-christian hierarchies go right of the fucking window. Struggle turns them into a feral tribe.
That’s what Anybody Home? turns into halfway in. A pure fucking struggle.
The Tyranny of Entertainment
When home invasion is involved, the question everyone asks themselves is why? Why would you inflict such gratuitous pain and terror to unsuspecting human being? Anybody Home? becomes even more meta when it comes to dealing with this question. Because most real home invasions have something to do with a form of retribution. Whether it’s related to organized crime or simply to an old grudge between two people, there’s usually a score to settle. But not in Anybody Home? The brand of terror inflicted by the unnamed protagonist has to do with entertaining people online. The cults as they call them.
The cults are omnipresent and all-powerful. They are always watching and get hungrier and hungrier for entertainment that feels real with every performance. You never meet any of them in Anybody Home?, but their presence is continuously felt. A little bit like the Eye of Sauron in Lord of the Rings if you will. Home invasion in this context is a form of stimulation aimed to make you feel "something real". Because you basically force an innocent family to feel it. The show doesn’t even stop if the cults start watching less, it only becomes more extreme and depraved.
Is this an easy indictment of bloodsucking, overmediated culture? Perhaps a little, but it’s also not taking the easy, boring shots at the usual suspects like social media and hyperdivisive figures who just shit on everything for clicks. No, Anybody Home? explores the other side of the question: us. Our endless desire for stimulation that transforms people into soulless fiends for attention. That is uncomfortable as hell. The cults keep watching. You keep reading. No one feels a sense of responsibility about anything. Because none of it feels real. Everything happens between you and a screen, which you have complete control over.
In that sense, Anybody Home?’s greatest accomplishment is not to offer any answer to the problem it raises. It leaves us stewing in contemplation of our own lower instincts.
*
Anybody Home? is a very good novel, but it is not easy. In traditional Michael J. Seidelinger’s fashion, it delivers itself to you in a crooked, roundabout way that will require you to slow down and reconstruct every scene mentally in order to truly grasp the horror of what’s going on. Sometimes it feels like a screenplay. It’s a little exhausting, but if you’re a combative reader like me it really delivers something dark and unique at the end, which is really the only thing you can demand out of a horror novel. Not one isn’t for every reader, but fans of Blake Butler and Charlene Elsby won’t want to miss this.
