Unreliable Narrators and Unreliable Writers

Hemlock Island. Kelley Armstrong. 2023.

The best thing - the only good thing - I can say about this book is that I finished it.

There’s no way and no reason to sugar coat this; this book was not good. I think it’s worth it to spend a little time talking about why.

Hemlock Island did not have an unreliable narrator, exactly, but it had a narrator who pointedly did not reveal everything she knew until late in the game. The problem here is that there was no reason for the narrator to leave it out; we had a first person POV, and there was no indication that this narrator was refusing to think about the hidden knowledge herself. In fact, she told us many times “I thought about my secret” or “then my friend and I talked about my secret” but just skipped telling the reader what the secret was, even obliquely. And why? Why hide it? Well, because Armstrong wanted it to be a surprise.

There are multiple ways to do this, of course. You could develop the character’s voice enough to make it clear that she doesn’t want to think about certain things, and deliberately keeps them out of her own mind. But there was nothing here to indicate that; again, the narrator does clearly think about those things, and talk about them, she just gets vague in the narration about it.

You could also, and I think this was the way to go here, revise how you’re handling POV. Don’t do a first-person narration, or don’t do it for the entire book. Actually skip the scenes where characters talk about the secret instead of clumsily expositing (paraphrased) “then we talked about the mysterious thing and it was so awkward and painful.” Or have a third-person personal POV instead, where we stick with one character and are privy to many of her thoughts but not all of them, so when it turns out she’s hiding something it’s not such a cheat.

I think, though, that Armstrong was a little too in love with this character and with her POV to give them up. The character is a writer who lives a kind of writer’s fantasy life - she’s successful, but not a sellout. She has a fabulously wealthy ex-husband helping to bankroll her lifestyle, he’s still madly in love with her, and her only conflict is whether to accept his devotion and his money. She has a palatial home on a remote island that she can use for writing and being alone. She’s a fantasy. I really hate reading other people’s fantasies.

This book also isn’t very scary, despite being billed as horror. The pacing is pretty bad; we spend too much time with people talking about their relationships. The isolation that the plot depends on is set up poorly; there’s no good reason for an island home you’re renting out to vacationers in 2023 to lack internet or phone lines, if only for liability reasons. The island seems to grow and shrink in size depending on the needs of the plot, which could be good if it were made part of the horror, but instead it was clumsy. The narration problem is the most glaring problem, but it’s indicative of other issues. This book feels like a first draft. I don’t recommend it.