Behind Closed Doors

Chilling. The villain's machinations and motives have been crafted like a diabolical puzzle box, fascinating and frustrating. Our heroine has been drawn with enough specificity that her circumstances are coherent (within the confines of the fiction), but also with enough imprecision to just barely edge the reader into a kind of terror by association. She is unlike me enough that I can continue to read, and she is like me enough for me to be afraid to stop reading; to continue reading is to continue this person's horror, and to stop is to strand her unresolved and unsafe.

Chapters alternate between the past and the progressing present the reader is quickly catching up to and on, illuminating tiny lightbulbs of realization as we reconcile that which we thought we knew then with that which we have become privy to now. This structuring unsettles in two ways: the more information we have, the less we are sure of what we have read, and the more sure we become that this story will become much more disturbing before it's seen to its end. Go ahead and Google the definition of “gaslighting,” if you don't know it already. It is rare for an author to be able to manipulate in their readers the same psychological distress and distrust that they create in their characters; B.A. Paris has constructed a narrative that will cause you to second guess your perceptions of the reality of this story from one moment to the next.

Trigger warnings: psychological, social, and emotional abuse; imprisonment; threat of physical and psychological endangerment of a person with an intellectual disability.

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Thank you to Goodreads and St. Martin's Press for the review copy.

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This review originally appeared on my website, www.lettherebelux.com