by Catherine Cheek
ErRatic, by N.D. Hansen-Hill is a quirky and unique paranormal horror novel. Unlike dark urban fantasies, where the magic has rules that everyone understands, the unusual happenings in this novel astound and confuse and occasionally terrify the characters.
Emma Rathburn summons rats, not intentionally, but every once in a while thousands of them will swarm over her, fall asleep, then wake up and disperse. She has no idea why this happens. Since she also causes the ghosts of dead people and the corpses of living people to appear, this is not the strangest thing about her. She’s afraid of losing what normalcy she’s carved out for herself. She’s afraid that everyone will find out about the rats, that her co-workers will decide they’ve had enough of her strangeness and not want to be her friend anymore, that her step-brother will snap and kill her someday, and that the ghost she sees outside her house means her harm. Mostly, she’s just scared.
Emma keeps calling the police about the mysterious man in her bushes, but when they show up, there’s no one there. Harley, a cop who works with her step-brother Jock, is intrigued by Emma, and he sticks around just in case. As he’s watching, a man in a rabbit suit pulls up in a van, gets out and goes up to the door. Emma runs out of the house and attacks the rabbit, knocking him down. Harley tries to intervene, and he gets attacked too. He thinks she’s crazy, especially when she says things like “Block of ice! Behind the door.” (There was no block of ice.) but he trusts his hunch and gives her the benefit of the doubt.
Later he sees her ghost too, and recognizes the ghost as an evil man who had been murdered a year earlier. When the ghost tries to kill Emma, Harley rescues her, and after that he puts himself firmly in the role of her savior. That’s not much of an exaggeration. Emma seems to have the back of her hand cemented to her forehead throughout the book, and she actually uses the line “I’m in distress” when Harley is about to leave her alone.
After she meets up with the rabbit again (who is actually the paranormal investigator Renaldo), the rabbit gets attacked by cars, Emma finds the corpse of a living person in an ice rink, gravel rains down on her brother’s head, and her dead dog runs around barking. Then things get really weird. Increasingly strange phenomena happen, mostly centered around Emma, until Emma’s life is once again in danger and it’s up to her friends to save her.
Lucky for her, she’s got good friends. They stick with her through thick and thin, trading witty banter back and forth no matter how strange things get. There’s even a cute romantic plot between two of the couples, where each guy thinks the other is after his girl, and each girl thinks her guy isn’t into her. Even though they know each other well enough to finish each other’s sentences, they remain mystified about the each other’s true feelings until the end.
Scary? Not really. For one thing, eighty percent of the book was people either ruminating about each other, talking to each other, or talking to each other about each other. The non-stop cheerful prattle deflates what creepiness the events provide. We’re told again and again how terrified Emma is, but even when she’s petrified with fear, she still manages to flirt and debate philosophical niceties.
The setting doesn’t provide much atmosphere. In fact, there are almost no setting details. Emma has a torn couch, and a high-backed easy chair, and a lawn with a tree. She also has her office, where test tubes are mentioned, and there’s a coffee shop which has a parking lot. Except for that, it’s all people talking in empty rooms. Even a country is not mentioned, though by the spellings I’d guess it was America. It could have been any city, any house, any coffee shop. We don’t even know what time of year it was.
Another thing that tripped me up was that all the characters have the same voice. They feel, in fact, to be the same character with a trait superimposed over them: Emma is Guilty-Terrified. Harley is Protective. Jock is a Jerk. Dale is Supportive. Nicky is Funny. Because it’s written in omniscient third person, we know what each character is thinking, and sometimes they read one another’s thoughts (real telepathy or just cleverness?). Adding to that the rapidly changing points of views, and I found myself very confused as to who was speaking. Here’s an example.
…Max frowned, as he considered it. “Interesting question, Chalmers.”
Renaldo was much more blunt, and his next words were enough to make Merlin elbow him. He’d never seen Renaldo so aggressive with a client before.
Because Renaldo now crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes. “You just want to know whether it’s you, rather than Doctor Rathburn, who’s responsible for Forsby’s appearance,” he said.
Who elbowed whom? Who had never seen Renaldo so aggressive before? Even after several re-readings, I still wasn’t sure.
The characters are all described as quite clever. Emma is a renowned scientist, as are Dale and Nicky. Renaldo has a PhD in psychology, and teaches at the U when he’s not dressing up like a rabbit or chasing ghosts. Even Harley has a Master’s degree. They also have a familiar way of speaking with each other, so you get the impression they’ve known each other a very long time. This means that sometimes it feels as though you’re overhearing a conversation where all the jokes are inside jokes you aren’t privy to. For example, they throw out the word ‘demon’ like we all know exactly what that means, and ‘imp’ as though we’d all seen one. One character makes a covenant with a demon, and breaks it, but we’re never told exactly what that covenant was or how it was broken. Maybe it was obvious for cleverer people.
In the dénouement, the characters sort of explain the events by using parapsychology terms. I’m somewhat well-versed in parapsychology, having obsessed about it as a teen, but it might as well have been technobabble for all the sense it made. None of the strange happenings get as much of a resolution as I would have liked. That makes sense, as the paranormal happenings are based off pseudo real life phenomena, and in real life things are messy. For those who like a tidy shave-and-a-haircut wrap up, there’s at least the romantic comedy plot.
ErRatic is a quirky, wild ride with a crazy cast of oddballs who manage to overcome their fear of the unknown and rescue a damsel in distress. More than anything, it reminded me of ‘Poltergeist’ had that movie been remade with the cast from ‘Friends’. It has flaws, but at least it’s not predictable. As several of the characters say, “You never know what Emma’s going to do next.”
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