My reading plan got off to a slow start this year due to health issues and other commitments including the launch of the Ohio Writers’ Association’s 2024 anthology Should This Book be Banned. So after adjusting my reading goals and a trip to the library, I picked up my first mystery read of the year, Everyone is Watching by Heather Gudenkauf.
The book is about five contestants competing on a live-streaming game show for ten million dollars. They are isolated in a California mansion without access to the outside world and the book jacket tells of dark secrets to be spilled. We’ve got Maire (struggling single mother of two kids, one of them sick) and Samuel who realize immediately they know each other from a dark past outside of the game. We also have sexual predator Ned who hosts a crime TV show, a senator, and a therapist for the fabulously wealthy. And we mustn’t forget about Fern, the game show’s host who is constantly berated by her wealthy boss and struggling with the urge to either quit or push through the pain.
What I liked about this story was that we got a lot of time with each of the individual characters through different tools that the author used. Chapters are from the POV of the contestants and host and some shift into the past, giving us a different perspective on events prior to the game. Some chapters are also set in an area of the TV set called The Vault, a private space where contestants share their innermost thoughts on the game. Further still, a few of the chapters are from the perspective of audience members watching the game show online, providing a glimpse of how the general public feels about the contestants and the show.
When it comes to the mystery genre specifically, however, I feel this story is lacking in a number of ways. Beginning with its title – Everyone is Watching: I went into this assuming that the audience was going to be a sort of additional character of its own. Even with the introduction of a few chapters from the audience’s perspective, it just didn’t really seem to matter that “everyone was watching.” There were no real-world implications to the game and it seemed to just exist as a way to get everyone in one location. I imagined the game coercing players into making difficult, dark decisions about their lives and the lives of the others involved. (Think Saw, Would You Rather?, etc.) What we got, however, was standard reality show-type competitions with higher stakes additions like scorpions in a sandpit.
Once I had adjusted my expectations from this being a thriller to more of a standard mystery I still found myself wanting more cohesion. Gudenkauf does a great job of offering plenty of clues, some researchable, for the observant reader, but the elements of the mystery don’t blend well. Our goal is to determine what all of these contestants have in common, AKA why they were chosen, and while we do eventually learn the answer it is both 1.) predictable and 2.) for individualized reasons. Without giving too much away for those who plan to read this I’ll simply say there isn’t a bigger plot that they are all a part of together. They have each, in some way, transgressed to get here, but that’s it.
Searching for a larger, connecting thread among the players may just be a me thing and might not affect some readers. However, I do think this book suffers from an unfortunate issue specific to the mystery genre and that’s its “It Came Out of Nowhere!” syndrome. If there’s one thing that readers of mystery require it’s the feeling of fairness at the conclusion of a novel. We are the detectives on the case hunting the text for clues. We’re fine with coming up with the wrong answer, but when the Big Reveal takes place we want to read it and exclaim, “Oh! Of Course!” This is the moment when we feverishly flip back through the book, pointing to little details we missed or considered unimportant in our first read-through. One of my favorite comedians, Mike Birbiglia, described a good ending as being both, “surprising and inevitable.” I’ve always found that to be true, especially when it comes to mysteries. This book simply does not deliver that. Somehow the ending of this story was predictable, yet other parts of it could not have been fairly discerned by observant readers because no clues were present throughout the text.
As an additional side note, I didn’t find any of the characters likable so I had a hard time rooting for someone to not only win the game but come out on top in the overall story. I might be reading too much literary fiction lately, but the lack of depth to many of the characters made this book more of a chore than it needed to be. I’m giving it somewhere between 2.5/3 stars. It wasn’t horrible, it’s just not going to be making any of my favorite lists.
briennedaugherty.com 