BOOK REVIEW: Even If We Break by Marieke Nijkamp

Book Review

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Book Review 🔪

Written By: Astrid (Events and Bookside Assistant)

Marieke Nijkamp’s Even If We Break is a newer take on a classic horror premise: the slasher. Five teenagers, all members of a tabletop roleplaying group, trek up to an isolated hillside cabin to play one last game before three of them graduate. 

There, a different kind of closure awaits. 

“Horror” is usually synonymous with the primal fear that sight and sound create within us—at least, it is to me. But Nijkamp is able to use the written word to not just follow but revitalize the genre despite a few weaknesses of the medium.

Like many a horror cast, Even If We Break’s protagonists, Finn, Maddy, Liva, Ever, and Carter, live in a rigidly conservative suburb where high school cliques aren’t just sites of community and friendship: they’re niches within a fragile ecosystem where every student finds their place by learning where and how to exert power. The group is somewhat protected by beautiful, charismatic, and privileged Liva. But while Maddy and Carter have status to leverage, Finn and Ever—the school’s only out trans kids—are too vulnerable to bother playing that game at all. Ever’s home-brewed city of Gonfalon is the only place where all five of them feel safe enough to be their truest selves. 

Or it used to be. From the book’s first page, we know that the group is falling apart. They’re painfully, haltingly casual with each other, dancing around a fight between Finn and Liva that both refuse to explain. Various circumstances—Maddy’s near-fatal accident and subsequent disability, Carter and Liva’s families’ dreams for their futures, Ever’s duty to be a financial and emotional caretaker for their little sister—have driven them further away from each other, and none of them knows what to do with the loss of the easy friendship they once had. 

On one hand, Nijkamp’s choice to tell this story from multiple first-person perspectives is a strong one: unlike a movie, which by its nature can only reveal character shot by shot, Nijkamp can give us free access to the protagonists’ interior lives. Their anger, hurt, and resentment are situated within larger contexts, and Nijkamp’s ability to not only switch between their inner selves and the personas they project but give us objective and subjective experiences with these personas gives the group effortless depth. But this has its downsides. All of them are hiding deeper secrets, and we should have access to them. We should, but we don’t, because revealing them too early would ruin the story’s slow-burn/slasher rhythm.This pattern of making their characters think about the hidden, shameful thing that would alienate them from the rest of the group and then stop just short of naming it even in the privacy of their own minds quickly becomes contrived.

Even so, what doesn’t work in the earlier sections easily works in a horror context. Nijkamp’s writing, for example, is sparse and relatively light in imagery. While it helps us feel like we’re listening to the perspectives of five people whose inner struggles have caused them to isolate themselves, it also detaches us from both the setting and the larger world the characters are meant to be connected to. But just a few chapters later, this more cerebral style makes the book throb with anxiety, become pinched and breathless with fear. When a character discovers the remnants of the killer’s first act of violence, they’re so overcome by panic that their thoughts just…skitter past it; that reticence is just as effective as any gore or viscera. Just as slashers transform their victims physically, the book unravels the characters mentally. Character deaths aren’t too grisly; some aren’t shown at all. Instead, the tension builds and builds until a character’s voice is simply snuffed out. Even as these deaths uncover the secrets Nijkamp hints at at the beginning of the book, each absence leaves both the surviving characters and the prose increasingly fractured and desperate. And the characters left behind become more precious to us precisely because their voices are what’s propelling the story forward.

Nijkamp’s inclusivity is also cast in an entirely new light. In classic horror, queerness, gender nonconformity, and disability were easy shortcuts to fear and disgust. Villains were meant to be flat and unknowable, and these deviances were meant to symbolize whichever fundamental deformity that compelled them to seek out and destroy the white, straight suburban normality the protagonists represented. But situating us in the perspective of queer, trans, disabled, and neurodivergent characters does more than just humanize them: it forces readers to engage with the genre in an entirely new way. If you’re disabled, how can you have the will to run, fight, and survive when even walking is a struggle? If you’re autistic, like Maddy is, how can you keep your friends’ trust when your inability to process certain social cues is read as callousness or cruelty? How can this group of friends remain enough to be considerate of each other’s limitations when they’re wracked by anger and fear and every second counts? By refusing to engage with these issues on the level of archetype or symbolism, Nijkamp encourages readers to see these events not through the lens of “normal/abnormal” but “connected/disconnected” or even “together/alone.”

Even with its flaws, it’s this commitment to detailing the struggle to maintain compassion and empathy in the face of fear that makes Even If We Break feel truly unique. If, like me, you’re a new horror reader, this book will be a strong introduction to the genre.

Image copyright © 2020 by Sourcebooks. Retrieved from Marieke Nijkamp’s website.