this book can best be summed up as the rough equivalent of maclean's hospital's summer stock re-envisioning of the seminal brat pack flick "the breakfast club."

instead of the jock, the princess, the brain, the beauty, the rebel, and the recluse, mcmahon gives us the bisexual nihilistic arsonist, the borderline-personalitied poet sniper, the philandering closeted obsessive-compulsive frigid-artist-housewife, the extremely fertile yet slightly homicidal alcoholic sculptor, and the possibly schizophrenic, possibly autistic ghostwhispering child.

yup, what we have here is john hughes for the criminally insane.

i don't really know what i expected from this novel. the POV alternates too frequently between Henry, Tess, and Emma to ever emotionally connect to/trust any of them. the character of suz seems so one-dimensional and scary that i had no sympathy for her or her fate. likewise, the perhaps deliberately shallow treatment of winnie/val makes the novel's final moments seem so far-fetched and superficial that i actually resented reading the entire book. in fact, i'd so far as to say that the end, which was ludicrously stupid, ruined any good aspects of this novel for me.

part of the problem here stemmed from the novel's inability to define its genre. imagine, if you will, one of m night shyamalan's newer films, and you'll get what i'm talking about here. for me, this novel was the literary or artistic equivalent of drowning slowly, which considering the premise built on creative destruction may have been intentional. still, i never felt dismantled, only disappointed.

2 stars for the uber-creepy doll and the precocious girl who used the word ungulate correctly.