REVIEW: The Handyman Method (book) by Nick Cutter, Andrew F. Sullivan

The Handyman Method is horror. I bought my copy new.

Review:

The Saban family are the first ones to move into a new, unfinished development community. Rita Saban is a successful lawyer. Trent Saban, her husband, is also a lawyer, but currently on paid leave (significantly less than he used to make) due to an incident that happened in the recent past. They have one child, Milo, who has a pet turtle named Morty.

When they first move into their new home, Trent's biggest complaint is that the beautiful lawn he was promised doesn't exist yet. The house itself initially looks perfect...until Trent takes a closer look and sees the large crack in one of the closets. He can fix it, he's sure, even though he's never previously been very handy. His ego has taken a bit of a hit lately due to his work situation, and he's determined to prove his worth by taking care of the various little issues around the house, starting with that crack. With the help of "Handyman Hank" videos he finds on Youtube and frequent trips to Home Depot, he begins to feel more confident and capable. But there's something darker behind those videos, and before he knows it, Trent finds himself caught up in it.

I went into this expecting Trent to be a decent guy who was gradually influenced by toxic aspects in his "Handyman Hank" videos, which included a pretty strong thread of "real men know how to fix things themselves" from the start. Instead, Trent was pretty bitter and awful right from the start, and it was pathetically easy for the "Handyman Hank" videos to get him to embrace openly toxic masculinity. I hated his internal voice and the way he thought about and talked to his wife and son. My dislike was so strong that, if this had been a longer work, I doubt I'd have finished it. As it was, I wanted to DNF it pretty early on, and unfortunately Trent only got more repugnant as the story progressed. 

Something I didn't expect: pretty much every character in this was horrible and off-putting, by the end. I started off with a certain amount of sympathy for Rita, but that evaporated as I found out more about her. The one character who 100% didn't deserve what happened to them was Morty the turtle (by the way, content warning for gruesome and graphically described scenes - pet death, self-harm, amateur surgery, and probably other things I'm forgetting).

All in all, this was an unpleasant book about largely unpleasant people, and I was glad when I finished it and could move on to something else.