The Babysitter Lives by Stephen Graham Jones , Isabella Star LaBlanc (Narrator)
8 Hours, August, 2022 by Simon and Schuster
I know better but I fell into a trap with this audiobook. When I saw there was an original Stephen Graham Jones audio novel, I couldn’t resist. I was fresh off interviewing Stephen at the Philip K. Dick Fest and was excited because I had not heard of this one. The trap is entirely my fault as I know better. While SGJ has been on a slasher kick lately his favorite novels of mine are Mongrels and The Only Good Indian. With a title like The Babysitter Lives I assumed I was dealing another slasher, which was a good trap. Unintentional misdirection.
If you don’t want anything spoiled know this is a horror audiobook, well produced, with a good reader in Isabella Star LaBlanc. It is about eight hours long, available as an audible original but also on the Libby app. I recommend this audiobook for horror fans of all stripes, but SGJ fans cannot miss this one.
So genre authors play with power cords, every SF writer has to do the major tropes of the field from time travel to generation ships and so do Horror writers. So you all should not be surprised that SGJ would one day do his own haunted house novel. I was excited to see him translate the various tropes through his personal lens as he did so well in his werewolf masterpiece Mongrels. One thing I know from talking to Stephen in interviews is he likes to consume the related media as fuel for his spin. You can feel the history of Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson getting SGJ’D in all the right ways.
One of the first things you have to figure out is why is the POV character staying in the haunted house. The Torrance family snowed in for The Shining, Lisa Morton’s The Castle of Los Angeles was a haunted theater that the main character had sunk every penny into. Right off the bat Charlotte the babysitter is perfect, she is hired to stay in the house and take care of the kids, she can’t leave. Just to make her situation even more clear, she had a disastrous ALMOST disaster the last time she was the babysitter, and even though only her mom knew, Charlotte on the night before her SAT, is sensitive. This was perfect.
The misdirection worked on me because I was not aware this was a haunted house story so when the kids were missing early in the book I felt it. I was nervous for Charlotte, as the novel unfolded into a deeper mythology and the elements of the classic tropes played out I found myself very engaged with the story. The element that Charlotte discovers slowly that the house she is in has been a part of local Halloween mythology unfolds in way that works perfectly with oral storytelling of it all.
Again I want to point out that my audiobook reviews are never as detailed as my reviews of material in prose. I will say I was confused from time to time in the final act and that is the limit to me of the audiobook, not the story itself. If I am not following the story, I don’t have a problem re-reading parts. I don’t always feel comfortable rewinding on an audiobook. Also, I consume audiobooks during walks, or eating lunch at work, so I can be distracted.
The Babysitter Lives is a GREAT entry in the long tradition of haunted house novels, in some ways it is an even better entry in the Stephen Graham Jones canon so yeah listen to it.
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