May 2

May 2 Book Review : Craig DiLouie - Episode Thirteen (2023)

I can’t think of a bigger discredit to the existence of actual ghosts than Ghost Adventures, hosted by self-professed paranormal expert Zak Bagans. The man is so aggressively passionate about haunted stuff and haunted places that he makes it seem like the norm (or something that should happen) instead of something genuinely creepy. It’s the weird paradox of making ghosts your business.

I bought Craig DiLouie’s ghost hunting novel Episode Thirteen knowing this based on how fucking terrifying his earlier novel Suffer the Children was. If anyone could pull it off it was him and…

Spoiler: he didn’t.

Episode Thirteen tells the story of a ghost-hunting television show called Fade to Black, hosted by Matt and Claire Kirklin, who self-consciously foster an on-screen Mulder/Scully dynamic. He’s the believer. She’s the science-driven skeptic. They don’t agree on much. When the opportunity arises to investigate a notoriously haunted manor called Foundation House, Matt seizes it like a teenager with a locked door and Wi-Fi seizes the day and everyone else has to follow him basically into hell.

Scaring People is Hard Business

What we have here is a polyphonic novel with five recurring narrators, each with wildly different personalities that need to assert themselves across 450-something pages. That doesn’t leave a lot of time to actually be scared. Horror needs atmosphere to settle. It’s a contemplative sport, and it’s tough to build dread when you're constantly switching points of view. It’s like trying to watch a horror movie while flipping through every channel on your TV. You get the general idea, but the tension evaporates.

Which is too bad, because the lore of Foundation House is legitimately unsettling. There’s a chapter around the 100-page mark where the Fade to Black crew finds old footage from the house’s previous inhabitants that plays like the hell reel from Event Horizon: choppy, abstract, out of control. You can’t fully tell what the fuck is going on, but it looks like something is eating these people from the inside out.

It’s a rare moment where the book brushes up against genuine terror. The signifiers of horror are all there, they just never quite coalesce. The fragmented narrative sabotages its own pacing, constantly rebooting the momentum just when things start to build.

There’s also a tradeoff to writing a novel with so many narrators. They need room to exist, and that room comes at the expense of the slow-burn dread the genre depends on. Horror is character-driven. What’s scary only works if it’s rooted in what a character is genuinely afraid of. And that fear needs space to bloom. DiLouie stirs a decent climax in the last leg of Episode Thirteen, but the balance is off. You never spend even half the book scared.

And that’s a shame, because it’s clear DiLouie wanted to do more than just write a scary book. He wanted to interrogate the performative spectacle of horror itself. How we package fear for consumption. But in doing so, the novel ends up mirroring the problem it’s trying to dissect: it over-produces the fear, until nothing about it feels scary or even real anymore.

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Being A Support Character

Another issue is the Matt/Claire dynamic. It takes up too much narrative oxygen and feels like a direct transplant of the Mulder/Scully archetype, minus the originality. Matt, in particular, reads like a Xerox of every opportunistic snake oil salesman you’ve ever seen on cable television. They’re the least interesting people in the book, but they’re running the show.

Ironically, the real substance of the horror lies with the support characters.

There’s Kevin, the tech guy, whose background in law enforcement makes him mostly (and understandably) unafraid of anything, which somehow makes his chapters scarier, because he’s the one who notices when things aren’t quite right. There’s Jake, the cameraman, who’s initially positioned to deconstruct the tropes of ghost-hunting shows until there’s nothing fake left to deconstruct. And there’s Jessica (not her real name), the producer, watching everything fall apart from behind the scenes, holding the camera even as the world frays.

Episode Thirteen is most effective when it’s happening to people who didn’t sign up for it.

Too fragmented. Too ambitious. Too derivative. Episode Thirteen dances around the concepts of found footage and supernatural horror, but mostly it dances around originality. I was disappointed, especially coming from an author who once wrote one of the scariest novels of the twenty-first century. But hats off to him for trying something different.

Would it work better as a movie or limited series? Probably. I’d sit and watch it. But the novel?

I’ve read it so you don’t have to.