Sour Candy

Genuinely creepy and quite readable, but also a bit derivative, and doesn't hold up to too much contemplation. (Contemplation makes it all so much sillier and absurd.) Also, the premise isn't fully explored. Weird vibe toward women. 

A happily childless man goes on a chocolate run in order to have a lazy, happy day on the couch with his equally-happy-to-be-childless girlfriend. He sees a harried woman with a screaming child. He makes himself known. Soon the woman is dead, and he's somehow the child's dad. 

The set-up is good, and it flows in the way horror stories tend to do – with an inevitable March toward “How am I doing? Not great!”

Sour Candy starts out very stylistically (Stephen) Kingesque. The main character even drops a “tough titty said the kitty” reference, which – trust – is a phrase King has used a lot. Where it bothered me is that this guy survives a car crash, the premise of the story lands on him, he does the rote denial very briefly, and then he becomes strangely omniscient in the midst of chaos. Like, he grasps too much, too fast, about a child who has said maybe 1 sentence to him, or 2. Essentially: If I do this, he'd do that, or make this character do this thing. 

Then, the story becomes more Lovecraftian in terms of an alternative world, a lot of red in an alien landscape, tentacles. 

The middle of the story is largely about the main character's testing the boundaries and paying the price, but the day-to-day is sketchy. Other than he is only allowed to eat hallucinatory (or revelatory) sour candy, which is wrecking him. In a novella, something has to give, but what gave was making this all as harrowing as it could be. 

His time with the boy – Adam – is glossed over. He takes him to normal places you take a child and sometimes the child screeches in these situations. That's clever for reasons I'm assuming most people get – kids are like that, and if you're the caregiver, you are now very much in the spotlight. 

It feels like there's more there, though. The people struggling to maintain their sanity as the children screams a store down still ultimately love that child. We know Adam is good at his masquerade and it feels like our main character being lured into caring would have fleshed out the story. His fighting the pull. When he was the other end of this, a witness to this child terrorizing his “mom,” he had sympathy, but he was also annoyed, judgemental. Now, it's his turn, and I'm not sure the story went there. 

There's another author I was reminded of. Richard Laymon. His books were written with very much the male gaze. This book wasn't fully like tat, but the women were written about in a (lightly) objectifying way in contrast to men.  “Attractive, probably used to be attractive, attractive-but-severe.” 

His girlfriend is all lingerie, sex, and innuendo. I get we're in a novella, and that this probably does read as paradise that is about to be lost through the lens of a straight man when he only has limited space to convey it.  But you lose something, too, in not making their relationship more, in not making her more. You lose something for at least some of your women readers. It's the difference between the main character losing a playmate and losing a soulmate. 

A couple of exchanges in the book also felt like they were mocking “wokeness.” The benefit of the doubt says it was just this guy digging himself deeper to the authorities, looking like a jerk to them by saying the wrong thing, but I don't know. 

There's a thing that happens at the end that tends to paint this child as karmic, a punishment, as opposed to completely random, which makes me wonder what's our guy's crime when the next guy is a cop who clearly abuses his daughter and has rage issues. Or maybe in fleshing out that one character it created an unintentional correlation and it all IS random. 

Now that I'm thinking about it, I wish the main character were either more admirable or more villainous. A scenario where he was more sexist and more contemptuous of “PC run amuck and parents who let their kids run wild” might have hit. A version where he was a better guy and fully in love with his girlfriend would have hit in a different way. 

I really enjoyed reading it. The only thing that bugged me as I read was his omniscience and the male gaze thing, and this wasn't bothering me too much. It's only upon ruminating on it in my sleep – I do that – and typing this out that it ages a little more poorly. It's still a pretty good tale, but I'd also not think about it too hard.