Mapping the Interior - Review

*I received an audio copy from Tor via Macmillan Audio. All reviews are my own.

You know, after listening to Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones, the story and the synopsis do not correlate at all. When I picked up this audio, I thought I was getting a spooky ghost story about a secret house within a house. The topic is becoming one of my irrational fears, especially with the uptick of news outlets reporting that strangers are living secretly in people’s attics and basements. Just no. But MTI doesn’t give that. It tells a story about a boy who seems to be looking for the ghost of his father, either to see him one last time or to curse him away from his family. I’m a little fuzzy on the motive. However, in Indigenous fashion, the story unfolds with layers of grief, sacrifice, and love that are most horrific and heartbreakingly possible.

"Walking through his own house at night, a fifteen-year-old thinks he sees another person stepping through a doorway. Instead of the people who could be there, his mother or his brother, the figure reminds him of his long-gone father, who died mysteriously before his family left the reservation. When he follows it he discovers his house is bigger and deeper than he knew.

The house is the kind of wrong place where you can lose yourself and find things you'd rather not have. Over the course of a few nights, the boy tries to map out his house in an effort that puts his little brother in the worst danger, and puts him in the position to save them . . . at terrible cost."

This is my first Stephen Graham Jones novel(ette), so I’m not too familiar with his writing style. So I decided to check it out via audio with Shaun Taylor-Corbett narrating the short. The story took 2 hours and 10 minutes to complete, which gave me time to listen, digest, and write a review all in one day! This is also my first time experiencing Taylor-Corbett, and I like him! I think he would do well in the horror genre. I would have loved to hear him in IT by Stephen King.

The boy lost his father in a mysterious accident years ago, and life hasn’t been the same since. It’s only recently that he started seeing movement out of the corner of his eye and apparitions in the shadows, so he began to think it was the ghost of his father and started looking around. While searching the house for answers, his special needs younger brother is experiencing frequent seizures, and the boy thinks his father can help cure him. The boy knows that his family has little money and no one would believe him if he tried to cure his brother the psychotherapy way, so the boy will sometimes secretly trigger his younger brother’s condition so his dad can swoop in to the rescue. Except, the boy realizes that the dad may be using the seizures as a siphon to gain entry back into the human world.

I liked the lore of the story. The way it was written and the feel of it made it seem like one of the ghost stories that was for the good, but then turned out to be very, very evil. It can also be viewed as a coming-of-age story. Jones wrote this in a way that appeals to all ages, and you’ll receive a different message within each group.

Overall, I have no rating for this title. I’m still processing what I experienced. I can’t tell if the boy was missing his father, protecting his family from his father, or holding on to adolescent pressure to become the man of the house. I appreciate the shortness of the novel, but there was a lot said that I’m willing to admit, I don’t fully understand. Until I do, no rating.

Mapping the Interior is available now!

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