I read All Things Seen And Unseen by RJ McDaniel in one sitting. I am not exaggerating. There was something so propulsive and anxiety-inducing (and I mean that in a good way!) about the novel that I couldn’t put it down, nor did I want to. This novel is a page-turner among page-turners.
The story belongs to Alex Nguyen, a 24-year old university student with undiagnosed chronic pain who we meet in a psychiatric facility. We learn little about why Alex is hospitalized, but within a few pages we understand she is to be released soon into a world that she is completely unprepared to re-enter. Alex has missed so many classes her only option is to withdraw from university, and as a result she is running out of time in her residence room. She has no job to go back to, and she is avidly trying to avoid her father whose only contact seems to be to pursue Alex for money, of which she has very little.
Right away, McDaniel builds in a soft touch of hazy unreliability which adds to the story’s tension and to the level of mystery surrounding Alex, her recent past, her hospital stay, and her estrangement from her friends and family
Included in this unreliability is the character Adam, a shadowy figure from Alex’s recent past who haunts her if not literally then at least figuratively and this is where the “seen and unseen” reflected in the book’s title begin to show up. After she is released from hospital, Alex relates an experience with Adam that we initially take at face value, but quickly the ground shifts from under us and we can’t be sure what is real and what isn’t. It’s an unsettling effect and McDaniel amps up the ambiguity quickly until we are, like Alex, unable to really trust anything.
Alex’s luck seems to take a turn for the better when an old friend reaches out with a plan for her to house sit her wealthy parents’ home on Vancouver Island and she is hopeful this is the fresh start she so desperately needs. Yet, an incident on the ferry and a strange poster on a community bulletin board set her off, and she realizes she is not free from the paranoia and trauma she thought she could leave behind.
The house Alex is hired to look after is an incredible blot on the natural world, all glass and metal, electronic and voice-activated with an elevator and an entire security room to ensure the wrong kind of people don’t get close. The house provides an extra layer of tension for Alex and for the reader and it is also an excellent commentary on who gets to exist in nature, and proof that money does indeed help you get away with anything. This house is worlds away from who Alex is and where she comes from and as the story progresses, there is a part of her that believes the house is rejecting her because she didn’t follow its rules.
In spite of everything, Alex opens up to a few islanders when she meets and befriends Amara, a trans man, avid bird watcher and leave-the-city-behind kind of guy with whom Alex ultimately has a relationship, and Leo, a friendly teen barista at the village coffee shop. When she is introduced to Amara’s friends and learns of their connection to her past life, things start to come into focus for Alex.
At the beginning of the book we are introduced to Alex using she/her pronouns, and yet toward the end there is a pronoun shift that is subtle but also unmooring. Again I wasn’t sure if I could trust Alex’s recounting of events, of the change in pronoun use, but ultimately, I could see that Alex was beginning to come to a realization about the trauma they’ve repressed and is allowing things from their past to come better into focus. And, in the end after all, Alex’s story is the only one we’ve got, so trust it we must.
I really loved this book. I loved how it dipped into climate fiction with its descriptions of the suffocating heat of the summer, and I loved the gothic nature of it with the futuristic house as adversary. I also loved Alex’s character (what can I say I am a sucker for an unreliable narrator) and the pockets of humour McDaniel (and Alex, by extension) uses to effectively paint a picture of a troubled yet hopeful character who is trying to put a life back together piece by broken piece.
I reiterate that I read the book in one sitting, and then I read it again to write this review, and I am still thinking about it. An absolutely wonderful debut (debut!) novel that I hope gets as wide an audience as possible.
Huge thanks to ECW Press for the ARC, I am so grateful. All Things Seen And Unseen is out in April, and you are definitely going to want to pre-order it!
Elizabeth Obermeyer 