White Space by Ilsa J. Bick (review)

Horror writer Frank McDermott has been secretly channeling his stories from the beyond through the use of the famed Dickens Mirror, eventually becoming ensnared by the evil that haunts the mirror. His five-year-old daughter, Lizzie, seeks to help her father escape the madness of the mirror but ended up providing a host for the evil herself. Now father and daughter’s meddling has released the characters, both good and bad, into indistinct universes of time and space called Nows, where their stories and monsters mingle and they can be killed because they are outside their own book-worlds. Lizzie hopes that if she assembles the right configuration of characters she will be able to reach her father, who is lost in the Dark Passages. Her main hope is Emma, a girl who, as a character in an unfinished novel, has seemingly escaped her narrative confinement and is able to write her own stories, and thus may be able to fashion Lizzie’s happy ending. The problem is that the characters don’t know they are characters, and when they find out, they waver between disbelief and existential angst, and by the end of the book it is unclear who is writing whom, and whether Lizzie is a lost little girl or the host of an evil spirit vying for release. The premise of this formidable brick of a book is soundly intriguing, and the details are clever in their literary conceits and originality. The plot, however, is marred by gratuitous and attenuated horror scenarios whose excess makes them unintentionally comic and squanders the adrenaline. Bick’s fecund imagination and insatiable rage for the macabre make the book read like a textbook for phantasmagoria artists and effects designers, giving relatively short shrift to the promising plot development even as the events grow more elaborate. However, the concept allows her the luxury of cramming four or five horror novels into one, so readers who think they can’t get enough may well find that they have met their match here.