Book Review: The Book of Accidents by Chuck Windig

 

The Book of Accidents by Chuck Windig
Hardcover, 530 pages
Published July, 2021 by Del Rey Books


Let me give this warning. I am a big fan of Chuck Windig’s work enough that I don’t give a crap about what the book is about. I see his name on the shelf at the library and it is coming home with me. I didn’t read the dust jacket or look at reviews. I just dived in. Part of my experience with this novel comes from the fact that I knew nothing besides the title and the beautiful but ambiguous cover.

This is a masterpiece if you trust me stop right here and come back because we have lots to talk about. It is hard to review this book without thematic spoilers. Before I get into the spoilery stuff, I’ll warn you. OK…

It is a horror novel and before we get much further, I want to point out how great Windig is at turn of phrases that scratch the chalkboard.

“It was then that he saw the stranger’s face.
It was crawling.
Something moved over it, black dots squirming in the light. Shiny and twitching. Twitch, twitch.”

“Chills ran over him like spiders.”

I liked this next one because in my hometown in Indiana we had a random water outlet tunnel we were all scared of. It was called the Grit Pit, so I smiled when I read this…

“The tunnel became the place of dares: Kids said that if you walked the tunnel at midnight, you might hear a train whistle, and if you didn’t run the half-mile length of darkness at top speed, the conductor would ride along in his ghost train and-
Choo-choo, chopity-chop.
Cut your head off too.”


Now the story, I do enjoy when a book fools me for the first act to think it is about something it isn’t. It would be easy to think after the first prologue to think you are reading a different book, yes there are two prologues. It is a big book so why not indulge your author here a bit, it works. The first prologue might lead some readers to think Windig was rebooting Wes craven’s Shocker.

F.Paul Wilson is a master of misdirecting readers to thinking they are reading one kind of horror novel and hiding the real agenda. Windig pulls this off nicely. For 150 pages I thought this novel was building a Stephen King-ish family drama-driven haunted house story like The Shining. While the structure, size and actual weight of the book is very uncle Stevie this novel concept-wise has more in common with my man Philip K. Dick.

Look I know I do a PKD podcast and you might think I see pink Lazer beams everywhere, I don’t. It is impossible to explain why without major spoilers but several important themes of Phil Dick are here and the influence is clear. If Phil wasn’t a direct influence on Windig 70 years of the Bay Area groundbreaker adding to the zeitgeist are very effectively here.

The Book of Accidents is a horror novel, but it is also science fiction, it is a powerful example of both genres and more deeply it has a theme I related too. At its heart is a character that is about watching everything end and feels helpless to stop it. I think that is something we all can relate to at this moment.

OK, you have been warned. Spoilers ahead….

In the first act of this novel, we are introduced to Edmund Walker Reese, a serial killer that is about to be executed. He disappears in the electric chair and it would be easy to think we are spending the next few hundred pages with his ghost. That is because the main POV of the first act Nathan inherits the home of his estranged father who worked the execution as a prison guard.

I could be wrong, as Windig said in the acknowledgments that he did multiple drafts that ended up looking like very different books. I suspect he is a seat of the pants non-outliner of a writer. Personally, I plan. Sometimes these big books are a result of panter writers who don’t know where they are going.  This novel seems to be benefit of that system.

The Book of Accidents is not a ghost novel at all but a story about multi-verses. This is why I say this novel is Dick-like. There has been plenty of novels that addressed the many-worlds theory, but what I think is important is how small the details. The fact that Windig doesn’t really say one universe or OUR universe is real.

Not only is the story a misdirection but Nate is not the main character, really it is his wife and more importantly his son Oliver that carry the back half of the novel. One amazing aspect is that Oliver at times is both a good guy and bad.  This is one of the best twists and reveals of the book.  

“…he’d subsumed a whole new identity. Into each world he went, he became someone slightly new to appeal to the Oliver of that place: sculpting himself into a key that fit into the hole in every Oliver’s heart.”

If there is any weakness to the novel it is the character of Jed, who is another who conveniently has written about the case. There is a logic for him to be there but I admit I rolled my eyes at first. I understand why Jed was there and it pays off later. Jed knows and understands what is happening, he knows the world is breaking down he also knows the Reese didn’t die in the chair but transitioned…

“He doesn’t belong here. He came one night during a bad storm. Been a plague ever since.”

Great creepy line, Jed’s misery and suicide attempt late in the novel is also a powerful scene. Jed understands that time is running out in every universe and that leads to huge, huge stakes.


“Olly, Listen. You need to understand, What’s happening here is what happened to other worlds I came from. They’re all gone now. Fallen worlds, collapsed into one another – there entropy won. I’m here now…like a prophet. A prophet nobody has listened to so far. This world, your world, it’s going the way of the others. It’s collapsing, and it fall soon. But I think we can fix it, you and I. I think we can save the world.”

The Book of Accidents succeeds as a horror novel but also science fiction. It involves multiverses, time travel, and the end of the world. It is a novel of big ideas built on a foundation of tiny but important details. Large universe-spanning stakes and small character motivations. The push and pull between the big and small makes this novel special.

Big thumbs up and my favorite Chuck Windig novel so far.