Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands by Chris Bohjalian

Doubleday, 2014

ISBN-13: 978-0385534833

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edtion, audio CD, Audible.com audio

After a nuclear reactor meltdown near her home in northeastern Vermont kills her family, troubled teen Emily Shepard is doing her best to disappear. The disjointed narrative of Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands is her story, told in bits and pieces, moving backward, forward, and sideways in time. Her memories of her parents, both good and bad; her time as a troubled teen; her journey from home to Burlington, Vermont; and her downward slide as a homeless teen fill up more than half the book. The rest is centered on her relationship with Cameron, a nine year old runaway, and her eventual trip back to where it all began.

Taking place in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion, I was surprised at how untouched the people around Emily seemed. Outside the “exclusion zone” near the event, there doesn’t seem to be the kind of panic or outrage you would expect nearby, or with refugees flooding in. They come, and then they’re gone. The environmental damage is localized, so once Emily reaches Burlington, there isn’t any imminent danger. It’s an apocalyptic story without much of the impact of the apocalypse visible to the reader, at least as we see through Emily’s eyes.

Emily herself is a perceptive writer with a love of Emily Dickinson, but as she tells her story, she’s oddly detached (not surprisingly, though, as it’s a reasonable strategy for dealing with grief when your priority is survival). While it’s understandable that she wouldn’t want to go into details of some of her experiences, it leaves strangely shaped gaps in our understanding of her. Emily lives through horrifying events and goes to some very dark places, both physically and emotionally, but while I couldn’t put this down, it’s more of a testament to Bohjalian’s skill in pulling me along than any sympathy I felt for her.

The ending is fairly predictable, with Emily returning home for closure and developing radiation sickness– it is the journey that kept me going. I wanted to know what happened next, to fill in the blanks of Emily’s story, and had to keep reading to find out if she would fill those in, and how. Bohjalian got a physical reaction out of me with his descriptions of Emily’s cutting and her encounters as a prostitute, and he certainly kept me going, but Emily herself, and the novel as a whole, were unconvincing to me. It just never seemed quite real.

I am a huge fan of Bohjalian’s The Night Strangers, so I know he’s capable of building atmosphere and doing detailed world-building, and Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands, while it kept me reading, does not measure up to it. The idea is great, but this isn’t his best work, and for creepiness and character building, it does not measure up to The Night Strangers. As he’s a fairly well-known mainstream author, and it’s overall a well written book, it’s worth it to have it in libraries, but horror readers may not want to put it at the top of their list. Recommended.

Contains: violence, sexual situations

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski