Hell

I don’t like books that mess too much with reality yet I’ve just read two in a row. Hell is a grim domestic fairy tale that leaves the reader feeling disoriented (kind of like falling down the rabbit hole again). Here’s the description from the book jacket:
Hell—part mystery, part domestic meditation, part horror story-is a brilliantly eerie novel in which three odd households coexist in a single restless vision: a dollhouse; a dysfunctional family in 1950s Philadelphia; and the cottage home of Edwina Moss, a nineteenth-century expert on domestic management. While the inhabitants of the dollhouse are powerless to shape their destiny, the four members of the Philadelphia family dedicate themselves to mutual vigilance, as if it might be possible to forestall disaster. Meanwhile, Edwina Moss concedes domestic control to the imagination and, finally, to the novel's governing spirit-the great culinary artist and chef to Napoleon, Antonin Carême.
It’s a slim novel and all these stories careen wildly into one another, placing serious demands on the reader; I was frequently confused and couldn’t figure out whose story I was currently reading as one morphed into another. Davis’ writing is dense and detailed and elegant. Even when I was not quite sure what exactly was happening in the novel I was caught up in the mood that the author created. Life is indeed hell for all the disparate characters. “Something is wrong” in all these houses, they are all absolutely miserable. Shelter and sustenance are the two driving themes of this novel. In Hell home does not offer protection: a tree falls into the house during hurricane Hazel bringing the storm inside. Characters feast and starve themselves. It’s all very hallucinogenic and finishing the book left me feeling relieved and a little exhausted, sort of like coming down off acid.