Hot Off the Shelf: One Eye Open by Alex Grecian and Andrea Mutti
[image description: The book cover for One Eye Open by Alex Grecian and Andrea Mutti. The background is a mostly blue pen-and-ink style drawing of a woman gazing downward while there’s a person shadowed in black watching her through the doorway. The woman’s face is illuminated as if by candlelight and she’s holding a coffee mug.]
Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review and I honestly LOVED it. There’s an affiliate link at the bottom if you want to buy yourself a copy.
Lately, I’ve been all about TKO Presents’s illustrated horror novellas. They’re so quick and satisfying!
I wrote about how much I loved Brood X last week, but One Eye Open by Alex Grecian and Andrea Mutti is even better. I’ve never read anything like it!
Before I dive in further, you should know that this is a spoiler-free review, so read on with confidence. And here’s the synopsis:
After her mother's sudden passing, Laura and her daughter Juniper return to her childhood home in the rural outskirts of Denmark. In the scenic village amidst seas of wheat fields, Laura hopes they have finally let tragedy behind them. Then, Juniper begins to notice something strange about the people she encounters, the same people who have worked in these fields for centuries.
In tracing her lineage back through her mother and beyond, Juniper makes a horrifying discovery. This town is alive with more than just nature, and the endless fields of wheat demand to be harvested, whether the hands that do so are alive or dead...
One Eye Open is an occult thriller about coming home and the monsters that await us there. By NY Times Bestselling Author Alex Grecian (The Yard) with illustrations by Andrea Mutti.
One Eye Open is set in Denmark and I’ll admit that before reading it, I hadn’t ever considered occult happenings in the country. Though, as I thought about it, I realized there are probably hauntings and occult happenings in every country and it’s just a matter of bringing these stories to light. Which is to say that necromancy in rural Denmark was cool as hell to read about!
This novella has it all: a creepy small town, a surly teenager, a frazzled mother, grandparents with secrets, an old flame, a whole population of people who are hiding something, people grappling with death (though not always doing it well), and a fantastic twist ending! I was up until like 3am reading One Eye Open and was thoroughly freaked out by the end. I was tempted to sleep with one eye open!
What drew me into the story was the identity-based investigation of the past and heritage that led to the occult discovery. Laura, the mother, was born in Denmark but moved to the US for school, which is where she met Juniper’s father. Juniper is half Danish but she doesn’t really have any connection to Denmark except for visiting a couple of times when she was little, which she hardly remembers. Juniper is able to pick up on the undercurrent of secrecy that’s riddled throughout the town and its people, but Laura isn’t exactly forthcoming with information. So for Juniper to understand what everyone but her seems to know already, she has to do some digging into her family lineage and heritage.
That strikes a personal note for me because the more genealogy work I do on both my Palestinian side and my Appalachian/Scotch-Irish/Welsh side, the more potential for the occult I find. It turns out that home remedies I thought were “common knowledge” are actually forms of granny witchery. I also recently learned that there’s a mention of a Palestinian witch in the Bible: The Witch of Endor. I wouldn’t have realized any of this had I not started digging into my own heritage, so I love reading stories where characters learn more about who they are and the mythologies surrounding their lives through investigating their families.
Another element of the story I especially appreciated is that there’s a compelling reason for the occult happenings. Sometimes I feel like I read (or watch) plot lines where occult things occur in a small town and the reason boils down to “all these people are evil freaks so that’s why they all congregated together in this small town, so small towns are inherently creepy.” I tend to see that reasoning as a lazy copout and not just because I’ve spent a fair share of my life in small towns. Stories become so much more interesting when there’s an actual reason for both people’s evil behavior and whatever creepy things are happening. Fortunately, One Eye Open provides both! The payoff is satisfying, as well as particularly creative––which is to say, it’s believable.
As an extension of my musings about compelling reasons for evil and occult, I love books with thorny ethics. I’m especially interested in horror stories that do this because it amps up the fear. We’ve all seen horror movies and read horror stories where we think the characters are stupid because they didn’t take the obvious choice or seemed to deliberately lead themselves into danger without any apparent benefit waiting for them on the other side of that decision. It’s much more interesting to me when there’s a kind of variable reward system: where there is a benefit to engaging with the occult, but if you get too obsessed or take it too far, then you’re screwed. Even better: when you can feasibly make the argument that the occult happening is mutually beneficial––in this case, for both the necromancer and the necromanced. Now that’s the kind of thorny ethics I’m talking about! One Eye Open does this especially well.
I was on the edge of my seat (or rather the edge of my bed since I was reading this under the covers with a nightlight) and super enjoyed this book. If you’d like a copy for yourself (and I hope you do because you’ll love it!), you can use my Bookshop link to buy one. Bookshop is an Amazon alternative that supports indie bookstores and this blog.
