Black Mouth is the first of Malfi’s books I’ve read and, while it won’t be the last because I enjoy his ideas, I didn’t immediately connect with the writing itself. That’s not to say that the writing is bad; on the contrary, I found the prose and pacing solid, the characters and plot intriguing. However, I liked the building blocks and concepts of this book more than I liked the execution. I felt like Malfi, to go all English Literature class, did a lot more telling in his writing than he did showing. I’m not a fan of being spoon-fed, and I felt a bit of that throughout the novel. The characters’ motivations and thoughts and struggles and fears were all laid bare in the exposition instead of being revealed through their actions. Even though I liked most of the characters and found their back stories interesting, this writing decision kept them from feeling fully three-dimensional to me.

This book gave me strong vibes of other stories. I was very much reminded of Stephen King’s IT, especially as regards a group of childhood friends who went through something horrible and supernaturally traumatic coming back together as adults when the dark source of that trauma resurfaces. I was reminded of Joe Hill’s Nos4a2, especially concerning the harvesting of children and the existence of a dark and impossible place hidden from the world but still, inexplicably, real. I was reminded of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes with the creepy carnival setting and dastardly, otherworldly magician. And I was reminded of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men by Dennis, who I liked but who felt like little more than a mystic version of Lennie. These are all stories that I like or at least appreciate, and I didn’t feel that their use as inspiration here was too overt or mishandled in any way, but it made this particular story feel less original to me, unfortunately.

I felt that the strongest portions of Black Mouthwere those that were flashbacks to that life-altering summer the four friends shared as children. There was a nostalgia to the writing there that reminded me of what I loved most about IT and Something Wicked This Way Comes and other books like them. That nostalgia paints the past in rosy hues, even in the midst of horrific events, and I love that mingling of ideas that should be such polar opposites but which somehow instead complement each other in inexpressible ways. It also dug deeply into generational trauma and the breaking of those cycles, which added a power to the story being told that I appreciated.

Black Mouth worked better for me in idea than in actuality, but I’m still glad that I read it. I’ve now been exposed to a new-to-me author with a backlist to explore, and I fully intend to do so. Because, while I might have not quite connected to his writing, I’m very interested to see if that disconnect was a one-off. I’m hoping very much that this experience mirrors my early encounters with Stephen King, whose work I once disliked but who is now one of my favorite authors of all time. And, even though I didn’t love Black Mouth, I definitely didn’t dislike it to that extent, so I think this is a promising beginning!