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| (Cover Artist: Rob Wilson) |
Over the course of its three-season run, the podcast version of Alice Isn't Dead incorporated themes of police violence, racism, sexism, and homophobia. Moreover, it did so all within the context of a genuinely original work of horror fiction. In contrast to the absurd but also warm community depicted in Welcome to Night Vale, Alice Isn't Dead told a gritty and often frightening story about the willingness of individuals to ignore injustices hidden in plain sight. This was a work of horror fiction whose suspense came not only from the shambling monsters who pursue Fink's protagonist, but instead Fink's simple but disturbing observation regarding American society. For a nation whose past is marred by slavery, genocide, and continual cycles of oppression and violence, the greatest demon our country faces may well be our capacity for apathy.
It's for this reason that I was curious how this inherently political work would be adapted into prose fiction. I'm happy to say that while the 2018 novelization of Alice Isn't Dead does sometimes struggle, it retains many of the same core elements that made the original so compelling. Fink succeeds here not merely by retracing the most important plot points of his podcast, but also expanding on the original story. Over the course of this book we not only receive a retelling of the story of the original podcast, but also further background regarding antagonistic figures such as the "Thistle Men," the frightening but brilliantly named "Police Instigator," and the enigmatic Oracles that Fink's first narrative couldn't convincingly explore due to the restrictions of its audio-message format.
Where this book stumbles is primarily in its opening chapters. Rather than taking the time to establish the main characters to new readers, the novel version of Alice Isn't Dead instead plunges headfirst into some of the podcast's gorier scenes, beginning with a kind of "cold open" in which Keisha watches as the creature that becomes the primary villain for the first third of the book physically eats a still living truck driver before her eyes.
In the original story, this scene managed to evoke a sense of isolating fear that eventually powered some of the podcast's more compelling subtexts. Yet here the rapid action loses meaning. One of the original story's defining moments came, at least for me, in the first season episode "Nothing To See" in which Keisha is attacked by aforementioned "Thistle Man" and turns to a police officer for help. Yet rather than receiving aid, this officer ignores Keisha's pleas, and instead accuses her of needlessly stirring up trouble while her attacker leers at her from just feet away. By contrast, the novel's take on this same moment only amounts to a hollow sequence of gore, with even the main character having yet to have been properly introduced to the readers.
And this is a shame, not merely because it undersells what turns into quite a disturbing and profound story, but also because the emotional and thematic background these moments lack are present later in the novel. Personally, I would much rather have started the story reading more a subdued prose rendering of the events immediately following Alice’s disappearance which Keisha periodically recalls in the ensuing text. This is a period of time when Keisha apparently struggled with her own conflicted feelings of grief and hope, unable to let go of Alice's memory due to her paranoid suspicions that her wife may have lead a secret life she never knew of.
That story is related in both the novel and podcast, just via brief flashbacks and paragraph long moments of exposition scattered throughout the main narrative. Yet because Alice Isn't Dead is a story about the process of recognizing the injustices that exist both within and alongside modern society, it only seems natural that this book should have begun with that moment when Keisha chooses to abandon the superficial security of her daily existence, and confronted those horrors head on.
Instead, the novelized version of Alice Isn't Dead begins only with a hollow series of action sequences that leave the reader feeling dazed, and a little disgusted.
This shortcoming is not story-breaking. If you can stick with this book through its early chapters then it will ultimately offer everything the original podcast did, if not more. I rarely find myself drawn toward the horror genre, as I often grow bored with the more prevalent tropes of zombies, vampires, and other stock monsters. Fink however is a writer who understands the true thematic resonance of the material he's working with, and draws on fears more universal than jump-scares and gross-out gore-fests. In Alice Isn't Dead, Fink manages to create a story that is at times awkward, but also unique, imaginative, and (a little unexpectedly) hopeful.