So I was originally coming at this review a bit more hesitant, because I’m being nitpicky and not really meeting the book where it’s at, and since I don’t read a lot of thrillers I’m not really the target audience.

But uh, actually? Half of this book is based heavily on the Villa Diodati. I made the gothic lit quest, my first (and only) paid writing gig was about Frankenstein and heavily referenced that summer, I made my friends a powerpoint presentation about it. If you didn’t want someone pretentious and annoying about that particular event to read your book, you shouldn’t have named your characters Mari Godwick and Pierce Sheldon. I am your target audience. Me! Specifically! If you aren’t going to hide it, I’m not either.

Anyway, my overall takeaway from this book is that Hawkins had a really cool idea with incompetent execution. Every one of my complaints boils down to the book saying it's doing something it isn't actually doing.

My biggest is the narrators. There's technically three, the modern storyline (in first person), the 1970s storyline, and the horror novel the 1970s character writes (both in third person)

Number one, that's stupid. The 70s storyline should have been written in first person, because the context of that story is more emotionally charged, I'm more invested in the emotions of that character, and so is the modern narrator who is investigating the events of that storyline (and discovers them through journal pages which are in third person for some reason). It would also make the difference between that timeline and the novel she's writing more contrasting. Like stylistically the book would be more coherent if it was written that way. I know it's a bad faith criticism to expect a book to be a different thing than what it is, but it just feels like a really poor choice not to present the story that way and straight up, I don't think the author thought that much about it.

Number two, the three narrators don't feel particularly different. Emily and Mari are both writers lacking creative inspiration, they both have problems with the person they love who came along on this trip with them, but largely ignores them to keep the peace. This could have been an interesting point of mirroring between them, which is what it was supposed to be, but because their narration styles were so similar they read more like copies of each other.

The Lilith Rising excerpts were even worse. This is meant to be a horror novel, Mari’s magnum opus, the cultural equivalent of Frankenstein (since Mari is just Mary Shelley). We're told it's the greatest work of feminist horror of the 20th century. But it feels barely distinguishable from Mari’s narration, which feels barely distinguishable from Emily's. You would expect the style of a horror novel to lean more on spooky, gothic sensuality given the sensibilities of both its source material and its time period. Instead it's the same deflated, over explained attempt at tension as the rest of the book.

You can tell that the purpose of these excerpts is to tell you things about the meta-narrative, and they conveniently give you exposition in the text that would be weird to read if you were actually reading a novel. And like, of course it’s going to do that, that’s how writing works. But I shouldn’t be able to tell that’s what you’re doing. Your job as a writer is to suspend my disbelief, and I can tell you I never once felt suspended about a single thing in this book. Everything I read, I read from the point of view of a writer making decisions to propel the story forward, not a reader watching a story unfold.

The plot is interesting, and the author is good at setting up characters, but the actual dynamics between them feel distant and dry. There isn't really much development from how they start out to how they end, so the endings, while interesting conceptually, don't feel like they actually conclude anything, because the characters haven't gone anywhere as people. I also think that a lot of the depth and complexity found in the 70s narrative does not come from any skill on the writer's part as much as the fact that Mary Shelley and her friends were complex, interesting people, with a lot of material to draw upon. When it comes to Hawkins actually depicting these people in that way, it falls flat. For a story that relies upon the sex, drugs, and rock and roll aesthetic of the 70s, the book feels almost embarrassed having to depict those things and does so as briefly and vaguely as possible. Almost like the author only ever has boring sex and has never been to a party where drugs are present (and I might be wrong, because I didn't even think the author had been to Italy based on how lackluster she describes it, but apparently she had. Nonetheless.)

Which speaks to the rest of my complaints, which are all mostly nitpicky, but have to do with a complete lack of confidence on the author's part. She frequently explains things that are obvious from context. The pop culture references are distracting, and written in such a way that I can feel the author trying to convince me that she knows what she's talking about, but the details indicate that she doesn't.

My final note is that I asked my friend to tell me spoilers about the ending and they couldn't remember. They finished a month ago. Idk what that tells you about the staying power of this book but it's definitely saying something.

This book is probably fine for most people honestly, I just came in with very high expectations given its inspiration and was left very disappointed.