#Book_Review: Eyes in the Walls by David V. Stewart
Stewart starts with a Stephen King-esque premise but finishes with an ending more satisfying than King would have given us.
David. V. Stewart is an essayist, author, musician, podcaster, and YouTuber whose work I’ve enjoyed, especially his commentary on music, literature, video gaming and pop culture. With that said, I haven’t read his fiction until now. I fixed this severe oversight with one of his short novels, the 2019 horror tale Eyes in the Walls, which fit nicely into a two-hour train ride from Kaiserslautern to Trier, Germany. It was time well spent, as this is an intense story of nostalgic adolescent horror that captures both supernatural fear and the everyday life fears of the divorce generation.
Stewart starts with a Stephen King-esque premise but finishes with an ending more satisfying than King would have given us. There is also something of The Exorcist in this, along with nods to horror writers, films, and TV shows popular in the 1980s and early nineties. To apply some veteran’s (very) dark humor, think of it as an “After School Special gone horribly wrong.”
Justice is done and evil defeated, not without cost but also not without reward. This stands in stark contrast to much of present-day horror which seems absorbed by hopelessness, nihilism, and tiresome torture porn. The evils described by Stewart are overcome by a mix of grit, trust, a tiny spark of love, and hesitant faith, which grow even while the protagonist’s life and sanity crumble around him.
NOTE - Take the content warning later in the review seriously.
The Story
It’s bad enough that Billy Smith is in middle school. It’s worse that his mom and dad are divorced, and worse yet that he’s caught like a pawn between them and their shattered lives. It’s even worse that his mom is a mortician, and they live together in an old funeral home. It’s worst of all that something evil is alive and well in the basement of that funeral home, and no one will believe him. It gets even worse when something evil starts to haunt him at night after his friends goad him into playing “Scooby Doo” to see if some urban legends surrounding the funeral home are true.
When Billy asks for help from the adults in his life, insisting that the monster and its attacks are real, Billy gets rewarded with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and psychotropic medication. Meanwhile, the nightly attacks get worse along with Billy’s mental health, and the evil seems poised to spread. Can Billy save himself, his family, and rebuild his life? A strange girl named Anna believes him and seems even to want to help him.
The Characters
Billy Smith is an ordinary but already jaded middle-schooler. He deals as best he can with divorced parents and the unpopularity one might expect would come from living in a funeral home with a basement morgue, especially one surrounded by legends of murder and witchcraft. His relationship with his mother is under incredible strain, and he doesn’t care for her latest boyfriend. He prefers to stay with his dad, exiled to a city apartment on the wrong side of town.
Billy escapes into video games, comic books and has started to run with a bad crowd, his miscreant cousin Jeff, and Jeff’s friends.
Anna goes to Billy’s school, and her older brother goes to high school with “Mikey,” one of the hoodlums-in-training. She heard about the incident at the funeral home from her brother and takes an interest in Billy. She believes him, and wants to help him, urging him to go to her church and meet Father James, the priest.
We’ll stop here because any more character discussion will just give away too much.
The World
It’s our world, no earlier than 1989, thanks to the in-text reference to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade beat-’em-up and its Nintendo Entertainment System home port (awesome game, I had it too). The Gameboy is the latest and greatest toy, but batteries rapidly run down. The Super NES hasn’t arrived yet or no one in the story can afford it. Cordless house phones exist, but there’s not a cell phone in sight. Homework is done entirely by hand. The one computer in the story is used only by Billy’s mom for work. There’s no surveillance cameras or hardened security features in the school.
It’s very pre-Columbine. No one mentions the World Wide Web, Kurt Cobain, Seattle, or grunge. Underage teens score cigarettes and beer (even though it’s Keystone, eew). The use of DNA profiling in police work is still uncommon and innovative. Buying comic books at a corner convenience store is still a normal thing to do, and the X-Men are riding high. This is the generation living an analog childhood but headed unknowingly toward a digital adulthood, and future shock.
Politics
Here’s the bottom-line up front: one can read the book as a harsh critique of Baby Boomers as parents and adults. If you’re a Boomer who bristles at even the slightest hint of generational criticism, even by implication only, this book isn’t for you.
As parents, Boomers come across as self-absorbed and completely lacking self-awareness. Stewart presents a reality that I think many of my generation saw play out in real life: the aftermath suggests the Sixties and Seventies weren’t all they were cracked up to be, but few want to openly admit it. They’re still too busy “finding themselves.” But boy, will they make sure their kids get the latest and greatest toys to make up for it! They’ve rejected God, but everything they attempt to replace God with sucks. The kids aren’t all right. But there’s hope that some will make it out alive.
Beyond their failure as parents, they also fail as institutional authority figures, as teachers, medical professionals, and law enforcement. They condescend to Billy and the rest of the ersatz Scooby Gang, and quick to whip out credentialed checklist solutions to any sort of trouble, which usually involves medications, therapy, and foster care, anything other than challenging their own biases.
Older adults, including a veteran police detective and a Catholic priest, tend to come off much better.
Content Warning
There’s no sugar coating it: the story deals with child abuse, including the worst kind you can imagine. However, it does end with a ray of hope.
Much of the action takes place at a funeral home with a basement morgue. There are many references to autopsies. There’s supernatural horror and spiritual warfare in the distinctly Catholic sense of the idea. There’s a demonic monster described in explicit up-close detail. Acts of necrophagy are described, and young people get injured. Make no mistake, this is a violent story. Rumors and urban legends of lurid crimes form much of the backdrop.
The mental illness aspect is superbly detailed, from Billy’s terrifying dreams and horrific nighttime encounters, to sleep paralysis and the effects of psychotropic medications, to grinding therapy sessions. If you have personal memories of just how badly the “system” can treat kids, you might want to skip this.
The story tackles the trauma of divorce, parental neglect, and indifference head-on with no filters. Some may find that horrifying enough, but the second monster Billy confronts bluntly addresses a subject that some readers may find too painful to read about because of their own past trauma, or that of someone they love. While it’s clear that at the end of the story Billy not only survives but has a path forward, it’s also clear that the road will be a hard one. He’s not out of the woods by any means, although we have cause to hope for him.
Who is it for?
This book isn’t for teenagers, it’s for adults who were new teenagers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For adults, it might be tempting to pass on this story as just a horror “period piece,” but they may find some new insight into their own lives, or those of their grown children.
The Generations X and Y nostalgia factor is enormous, and at first, you’re lulled into thinking it’s an episode of Goosebumps, Are You Afraid of the Dark, or even Tales from the Darkside. This makes the jump headlong into real-life horror shocking, but Stewart thankfully doesn’t turn that shock into exploitation.
I recommend the book for people who enjoy King’s work but reject his metaphysics. In contrast, Stewart presents King-like ideas in an unapologetically Christocentric reality informed by Catholic doctrine regarding spiritual warfare. The Devil and his minions are very real, but so is God and the power of his Church, albeit shown through a trial that would give Peter Blatty a start.
Why buy it
Eyes in the Walls is a tight and intense read. Short but filling, terrifying but hopeful. In that aspect alone, lacking the nihilism, snark, and too-clever-for-its-own-good approach which characterizes much of contemporary horror, it stands out from the pack. The good guys win but do not come through unscathed. The nostalgic setting shows a decaying world and a battle for everyday survival, a world all too real to many. Most importantly the book gives a wounded young man the chance to be a hero.