Blair's Reviews > The Changeling

(3.5) The Changeling is a sprawling horror novel that starts out mundane and ends up wildly fantastical. Looking through other reviews, it seems (unsurprisingly, I guess) that LaValle's 'everything but the kitchen sink' approach is polarising. My feeling is that it doesn't work 100% of the time, but enough of it sticks to make the book worth reading.

Apollo Kagwa is a rare book dealer in New York. He meets Emma, a librarian, and they fall in love and have a baby, whom they name Brian after Apollo's absent father. Determined to be a better dad than Brian senior, Apollo throws himself into the demands of parenting. Emma, though, seems to be suffering severe postnatal depression. Apollo is unsympathetic, but Emma's troubles eventually come to a horrifying climax, and her actions tear Apollo's life apart. In the aftermath, he finds himself on a bizarre odyssey involving witchcraft, a $70k copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, a commune of women and children on an island in the East River, a bunch of internet trolls, a literal gigantic ancient troll, Norwegian folklore and – if you can believe it – more besides.

I wasn't sure about The Changeling to begin with. There's SO MUCH exposition. Too much. Some of it is interesting: I liked that we got to hear about Apollo's parents before meeting him; this establishes his mother Lillian as an important character in her own right. Some of it, however, is extremely overwrought. I would have understood that Apollo loved his son without pages upon pages of parenting drudge and, especially, the interminable chapter about Brian's birth.

But once the story gets going, it gets going. It shifts rapidly from mildly creepy – Emma receiving photographs of her son that disappear after she looks at them – to dark fairytale to full-on horror. I can truly say that, in the second half, I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen next or where the story was going to go. There's so much happening that, inevitably, a lot of loose strands are never properly tied up; still, it's never less than ferociously imaginative, so even the bits that don't quite work/make sense are kind of enjoyable.

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