John Darnielle might be the most consistently excellent writer I've ever read. Both stylistically and structurally, this book was pretty damn perfect. Even the imperfect parts become retroactively perfect after the end.

I also don't usually cry over books, or I avoid books that I know will make me cry. But I cried over this book three times. I hate crying, but any book that can get that kind of reaction out of me is an automatic banger.

If audiobooks are your jam, I highly recommend listening to this. I went back and forth between audio and print. Darnielle narrates and first, he has a great voice (hello Mountain Goats). But he also brings a strange but wonderful cadence to his words. It takes a minute to get used to, but it makes everyone and everything involved more real. To me, that's Darnielle's greatest strength in all of his books. His characters are more real than a lot of real people.

I just loved this so much. I was lucky enough to catch Darnielle at an event with Left Bank Books in St. Louis in January. He said that if he could distil his work into a single word, it would be Mercy. And yes. For the last several years, I've been trying to remind myself that each of us contains multitudes. This book is that idea manifested.