Elaine Mercado's 'Grave's End'

               Well, it was better than Amityville. I know, I know--dead horse, doesn’t tell us much, yadda yadda. If I didn’t come into this one with a bunch of no-fun-at-all skepticism keeping me in check, though, there’s a good chance I would’ve bought into it. It isn’t just that the writing is better than Anson’s (It is. It’s a lot better, even if it still felt like there was a gap between Mercado and a polished storyteller), but that the entities being drawn up here simply feel more believable. For the most part. While there was definitely a turning point at which the spirits of Grave’s End began reading a little too clichéd or nonsensical to take seriously (looking at you, weepy bride and ghost farts), the believability factor remained relatively intact throughout, thanks in no small part to the tedium and anticlimax that washed over the text like a cold shower.

                Fiction usually delivers. It’s kind of its thing. When it comes to fiction we can legitimately expect that justice will be served, that emotions will define events, and that big, loud, meaningful things will happen. We’re so accustomed to stories working this way, I think, that we’ve come to associate the opposite of these qualities with reality. Compared against fiction, reality is slow and boring and rarely delivers. You’re a lot more likely to fall in love by meeting someone through mutual friends and talking than by realizing the lab partner you’ve hated for so long actually gives your life all the beautiful things you never knew you were missing. When I argued that The Lovely Bones invested too much in establishing a sense of reality, I viewed the tease of dangling Harvey’s potential arrest in front of the reader, as well as the subsequent dashing of our hopes, as an attempt to show how real it was by painting itself in very “anti-fiction” colors. This isn’t to say that I don’t approve of the technique; George R.R. Martin’s got a similar thing going in his Song of Ice and Fire series, and I enjoy the hell out of that. On the contrary, I think it’s extraordinarily useful when applied with some tact, and it’s what elevates the sense of authenticity in Grave’s End’s hauntings over those of Amityville.

                Grave’s End is largely just a bunch of waiting. Waiting for the ghost antics to escalate, waiting for the psychics to arrive, waiting for Elaine’s marriage to fall apart. Its events stretch out over the painfully slow span of twelve years, and it ends with their first proactive attempt to manage the situation through a fairly uneventful cleansing. The conflict arc plateaus after the first forty pages and drops off effortlessly in the last five or so, and I can believe the hell out of that. I thought it was kind of boring, and I probably wouldn’t read it again unless I had to, but it definitely has the ring of a true story. Whether Mercado captured that feeling by accident, by legitimately telling the truth, or through conscious effort, her book has a quality that I think most fiction writers are constantly striving for. If we can maintain that level of truthiness and still work in all the juicy perks that make fiction worthwhile in the first place, we pretty much win the game.