Land of enchantment and tentacle enhancement.

71. American Elsewhere – Robert Jackson Bennett

One hundred pages in, I really thought I was going to like this book a lot. There’s a very David Lynch-but-clear style to the beginning. Mona leaves one weird town for another, more 1950s looking town in the middle of nowhere New Mexico aka Wink. She’s kind of a grumpy character and has some unfinished business with her mother…way more than she thought.

Wink is weird for a reason, an otherworldly reason, but it also has a roadhouse and some seriously trippy woods, so I kept getting reminded of Twin Peaks. And to an extent, it would be nice if there was more Twin Peaks than H.P. Lovecraft because maybe things would’ve stayed on the strange and narrow.

I mean, I love a good abandoned lab and a place where the boundaries between worlds are thin, but there was just way too much here. Way too many words and pages and to an extent, characters with tentacles. And I have to say, in the end, Mother was not that formidable of an adversary. She’s definitely not more scary than Mom from Mom’s Friendly Robot Company.

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The face of an otherworldly and very weird guinea pig- Finny.