**SPOILERS INCLUDED!!**
I’m just gonna start here – this book is wild. Hello! I, as usual, am late to the party when it comes to ARC books. But I’m happy to amend that with my very first ARC read, Schroeder, written by Neal Cassidy. I have been SO looking forward to sharing my thoughts about this book that I almost DNF’d! No shade intended, this turned out to be excellent, but my experience of reading this book went a little something like this…
Sighhhhhh
UGH
ZzZzzZzZzZ
what the FUCK
Hmm, okay, okay…
Oh shit. OH! SHIT!
Sniffle
*cries in horror*
Schroeder is the story of a young man at the end of his rope. Something has broken him and we begin the story unaware of what it was. I’d call this literary fiction with surprise elements of mania and I’ll begin by saying that this is going to be a challenging read for fans of typical horror. The book is written in stream-of-consciousness style as we join Schroeder for a day-long bike ride through town. We are privy to his thoughts on everything from everyday etiquette to childhood memories. Because of this device many of the pages are just a solid block of text from top to bottom that become exhausting on the eyes. Our protagonist also tends to use overly complicated vocabulary that will cause the reader to need to stop and look words up, though I believe there’s a reason for this.
I wanted to present those slight negatives first because I think it’s important for me to explain why I think you shouldn’t let these choices deter you from the story. I’m not gonna lie, some pages are a SLOG. But if you can power through, this turns out to be a fascinating, emotional story. It’s my opinion that Cassidy made these alienating choices on purpose. A quarter of the way into the book I was considering not finishing it, though something nagged at me. I was bored, that was true enough, but I also recognized that there was something not right about this character, something bothersome. When he began committing acts of violence that certainly increased the excitement of the book for a moment, but then we were right back to riding his bike through town.
I sat with this for a while and asked myself why an author would intentionally want to alienate the reader like this and then it dawned on me: I (the reader) am society. I am the society that has let this character down. (Heads up, this is going to get dark.) What do we eventually learn about nearly every 17-25 year old young man who ends up committing a large act of violence like a school shooting? It seems inevitable now that we hear the same story, time after time, of a broken home, a system which made mistakes and didn’t see the signs, and red flags that went completely unnoticed. I, like so many who failed those young men before they became monsters, did not have the patience or care to sit with this young man for the time it would take to hear his story. I was willing to close the book when he became difficult to deal with and simply allow his story to progress on without me. (Almost!) An act which would have left me partially responsible for his future actions.
Powerful stuff right? And so, feeling accused, I continued on with Schroeder, hearing him out while he rode his bike from victim to victim, leaving death and destruction in his wake. And I’ve got to try and balance my thoughts here because on the one hand I want to go a little deeper than my Goodreads review, but on the other I don’t want to give too much away. We do eventually learn the cause that sparked Schroeder’s spree, but more interesting than that to me was the reverse Breaking Bad that Cassidy pulls with this novel.
What do I mean by that? Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad, has said in interviews that he really wanted to take an average guy and, over the course of five seasons, turn him into a monster. Cassidy does the opposite by presenting us with a monster early on and slowly molds him into someone we can empathize with, even love. One could say that’s the harder task after what Schroeder spends 3/4 of the book doing.
I won’t give away the ending, but you know it’s a horror story that goes beyond when it leaves you in tears. I’m glad I stuck with him. Schroeder needed somebody to hear his story and understand him. Will it be you?
4/5 stars for a fantastically complicated literary horror read.
briennedaugherty.com 