THE APARTMENT - S.L. GREY

Title:           The Apartment
Author:      S.L. Grey
Publisher:  Blumhouse Books
Pages:         288

Review Score:

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Summary:

Recovering from a traumatic home invasion, a troubled couple enters another haunting nightmare while vacationing in Paris.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Chapter 1 – Mark – Still coping with trauma suffered after a home invasion, troubled married couple Mark and Stephanie Sebastian host dinner for Mark’s longtime friend Carla and Carla’s new boyfriend Damon. Carla suggests that Mark and Steph get out of Cape Town and travel to Paris. Damon recommends a house-swapping website to make the trip more affordable. Steph is excited by the idea, but Mark interjects that they cannot afford a holiday and also need to consider their two-year-old daughter Hayden.

Chapter 2 – Steph – Without telling Mark, Steph signs up on the house-swapping website and begins looking into a Paris trip. Steph’s mother Rina offers to help pay for travel. Steph makes contact with prospective house-swappers the Petits in Paris.

Chapter 3 – Mark – While working at the university, Mark reflects on his deceased daughter Zoe from a previous marriage. After Steph reveals that she signed them up for the house-swapping site, Mark clandestinely contacts Steph’s mother Rina to accept her offer of paying for their trip. Steph is initially upset when she discovers Mark also arranged for her parents to watch Hayden while they are in Paris without discussing it with her first.

Chapter 4 – Steph – Steph prepares the house for the Petits. Carla agrees to act as liaison. Steph recalls how she first met Mark on campus. Upon arriving in Paris, Steph and Mark are disappointed to discover that the Petits apartment is in poor condition with meager accommodations.

Chapter 5 – Mark – In the middle of the night, Mark and Steph are woken by loud pounding on their apartment door. Mark follows footsteps through the courtyard outside and has an unusual encounter with an odd woman living upstairs.

Chapter 6 – Steph – An email from Carla informs Mark and Steph that the Petits have not arrived in Cape Town. Steph’s mind wanders back to details of the home invasion. While trying to shop in Paris, Steph and Mark discover that they neglected to authorize their credit card for travel abroad and have only 350 euros remaining for their trip.

Chapter 7 – Mark – Mark is disturbed to find three large buckets of human hair in an apartment closet, reminding him of his first wife Odette and deceased daughter Zoe. While disposing of the hair in a storeroom, Mark finds a child’s belongings and believes he again hears sounds of a child crying. Mark also has another cryptic encounter with the woman from upstairs.

Chapter 8 – Steph – Mark goes out alone to try contacting the bank. Steph introduces herself to the woman upstairs in order to obtain her wi-fi password and learns she is named Mireille. Mireille insists that no one else lives in the complex, claims to have never met the Petits, and warns Steph that she and Mark should leave. Steph Skypes with her mother and Hayden again and receives another message from Carla that the Petits have still not arrived. Steph translates a strange paper she found written by a child. A knock at the door leads Steph to briefly explore a strange apartment across the way. Mark returns home spooked.

Chapter 9 – Mark – While waiting to speak to his credit card bank via Skype, Mark passes the time in a wax museum. There, he encounters a vision of his daughter Zoe as if she had never died and was now grown. She accuses him of having murdered her. The two of them make physical contact. Zoe bites Mark’s lip.

Chapter 10 – Steph – Steph’s disposition improves when she receives word that a literary agent is interested in her young adult novel manuscript. Mark finds a business card in the abandoned apartment leading to a realtor who reveals that the building has a problematic rental history. Mireille reacts strangely when she discovers Mark and Steph have a child. The Petits finally respond with a brief, vague email.

Chapter 11 – Mark – Mark and Steph bond while cooking. Mireille invites herself over for dinner. After speaking cryptically, she jumps out of a window.

Chapter 12 – Steph – Mireille mutters an apology before dying. While Mark and Steph are detained by police, Capitaine Claire Miske informs them that Mireille was known as a troubled person. Unable to change their flights to return home immediately, Mark has Carla book them a hotel room so that they do not have to stay in the apartment. Upon reaching the hotel, they discover their reservation was made for the wrong month and they have no other way to book the room until they can contact Carla again.

Chapter 13 – Mark – Mark and Steph reluctantly return to the apartment. Waking from strange dreams to the sound of Zoe crying, Mark is led to his ghostly daughter in the courtyard. She kills a cat in front of him. Steph interrupts as Mark takes the dead animal and Zoe vanishes. As Mark tries to explain he did not kill the cat, Steph insists they leave immediately for the airport. Strapped for cash, Mark is forced to beg strangers for train fare, leading to a conflict between he and Steph over what happened during the home invasion.

Chapter 14 – Steph – Steph mulls over Mark’s bizarre behavior during their flight back to South Africa.

Chapter 15 – Mark – Steph notices small things amiss in the house upon returning home. Mark catches up with Carla. Later, he recalls how Zoe died when he carelessly left out a bottle of tranquilizers that she swallowed. Mark takes Hayden’s sheets off her bed and begins replacing them with Zoe’s.

Chapter 16 – Steph – Steph stays home with Hayden while Mark visits Carla. After Hayden frightens Steph by accidentally hitting the house’s panic button, Steph learns from her neighbor Karim that their alarm had been going off intermittently while they were in France. Steph interrupts Mark as he changes Hayden’s duvet cover. Steph later notices Zoe’s cover on the floor and takes it outside to the trash.

Chapter 17 – Mark – After catching Mark retrieving Zoe’s bedding from the trash, Steph forces Mark to see a psychotherapist. Mark continues to be fascinated by clumps of hair, including one belonging to Hayden pulled from the bathtub drain.

Chapter 18 – Steph – Steph continues finding small things amiss throughout the house. Hayden tells Steph that she saw a lady under her bed. The Petits send an email apologizing for not coming to Africa and asking for a review of their apartment. Steph tells Karim about the Paris trip. Carla comes over to comfort Steph when Mark fails to return home from his therapy session. Carla contacts a sangoma to cleanse Steph’s house of negative energy. At Hayden’s insistence, Steph checks under her daughter’s bed and briefly spies a fleeting shadow.

Chapter 19 – Mark – Zoe appears to Mark as a student in his classroom. Carla’s sangoma Marlies comes to cleanse the house. Marlies’ ritual causes Mark to have another vision of Zoe in which she admonishes him for trying to revive her using dead animal pelts and hair, insisting instead that she needs a live vessel.

Chapter 20 – Steph – Her marital troubles mounting, Steph turns to Karim for conversation and the two of them end up kissing. Steph has another ghostly encounter in the house as Hayden takes ill. Steph researches the Petits apartment and finds another dissatisfied renter who died under tragic circumstances.

Chapter 21 – Mark – Thinking he can connect to his dead daughter through hair, Mark prepares to kill a live squirrel over Zoe’s grave, until at last convincing himself that the ghost is not Zoe. Mark calls Odette and is reminded that Zoe loved cats and wore Hello Kitty sneakers, not Scooby-Doo shoes like the ghost. Mark has another encounter with Zoe in a bar bathroom, but is beaten by a patron when the vision turns out to be another woman. Mark returns home and begins cutting Hayden’s hair.

Chapter 22 – Steph – After catching Mark cutting Hayden’s hair, Steph hurriedly leaves the house with her daughter to stay at her parents’ bed and breakfast. An email from a French realtor reveals that the Petits apartment supposedly became haunted after a resident, traumatized by his wife’s death, mutilated his youngest daughter before jumping from a window. The man’s oldest daughter found the bodies. Steph speculates that the surviving daughter was Mireille. Steph calls the building’s owner in France and speaks to the man who impersonated the Petits. He tells Steph he is “sorry it had to be you” before abruptly ending the call.

Chapter 23 – Mark – Mark’s mental breakdown continues. Carla comes over and the two of them get physical, but Mark is haunted by another vision of Zoe in rotting corpse form. Mark wakes the next morning to find himself with Carla’s dismembered body.

Chapter 24 – Steph – Two months after the murder, Mark remains locked in an institution Steph never visits. Now free of evil, the apartment building in Paris becomes prosperous again. Steph rents Mark’s house to Karim’s cousin’s family, who also endured a brutal home invasion. Steph watches Karim’s cousin at the house from a distance, silent apologizing for using his family to take the haunting from their home that they brought back from Paris.

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Review:

Mark and Stephanie’s relationship has been seized by unspoken issues of an age gap, career gap, and a problematic previous marriage.  Steph perceives a coldness from Mark toward their two-year-old daughter Hayden, suggesting Mark doesn’t see her the same way he did his dead daughter Zoe.  Mark’s complacent catatonia also inspires an impotent failure to react during a psychologically traumatizing home invasion.  Still the couple remains non-confrontational, silently stewing in individual uncertainties about who they even are to one another.

Mark’s longtime friend Carla proposes therapy by way of a Paris vacation.  On his salary as a university teacher and her hope of becoming a published novelist, Mark and Steph could never afford such a luxury.  Once they find an economic alternative by way of an online house-swapping website, the idea seems even more like exactly the remedy they require.

Mark and Steph trade South Africa for France, but quickly discover their accommodations are not as advertised.  Instead of a happy holiday, their getaway is gloomily gothic.

Mark and Steph’s temporary apartment belongs to a bleak building with only one reclusive resident.  Windows won’t open.  Strange smells and stranger sounds hint at hidden secrets they aren’t sure they should uncover.  Seemingly no one even knows the Petits, the French family whose place they are renting.  Mark and Steph try talking to their house-swapping partners directly, except the unseen Petits oddly never arrived in Cape Town.

Steph sallies forth to salvage a smidgen of the Parisian paradise she initially envisioned.  Mark plays along, but the pall hanging over their apartment haunts him in a very unusual way.  Already uncomfortable, Mark is shocked further when he comes face-to-face with someone who could not possibly have followed him to another country.

Steph seeks answers from the lone woman living upstairs only to end up with more questions.  What starts as a mystery becomes a waking nightmare as Mark and Steph delve deeper into details surrounding the apartment.  By the time they head home, the atmosphere comes with them, forcing husband and wife to finally face truths about themselves and their family that may be more frightening than what they found in France.

Told in two first-person accounts alternating between Mark and Steph’s minds, “The Apartment” is a collaboration between Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg writing under their tandem nom de plume S.L. Grey.  Gender bias might guess Lotz wrote Steph’s chapters while Greenberg tackled Mark’s, though there is no way to know by reading alone.  Their seamlessly integrated style combines parallel narratives through a distinctively singular author’s voice to create an impressively compelling chiller.

For much of the novel, the plot plays coy about outing itself as a strictly psychological, supernatural, or viscerally grounded thriller.  Uncertainty over potential themes instills alertness in the reader that heightens this sensation of cerebral unsettlement, while the fiction itself is never uncertain about direction.  Uneasiness exists in not knowing what the ultimate threat to Mark and Steph even is, but being desperately anxious to identify it.

Scenes set in the Paris apartment have a particularly Lovecraftian tone to their terror.  On top of the foreign locale, an additionally alien feel comes from immersion into Mark and Steph’s unfamiliar surroundings, as though the couple has subtly sidestepped into a displaced dimension or era.  They remain in our time, in our reality, though something feels acutely “off.”

The gradual build of early acts isn’t so much a stall for suspense or momentum misdirect as an introspective look into a different subset of these people’s psyches.  Mark’s middle-aged characterization and Steph’s insecurities speak to relatable concerns about being more passive, less aggressive over trivial posturing in a challenging relationship.  Drama fires from all sides in “The Apartment,” not just from fears of what lurks in the shadows of a Parisian courtyard or fractured memory.

Only with hindsight do detailed descriptions read retroactively as superfluous distractions.  Grey excels at establishing environments such as a tourist-filled wax museum or streets cloistered with unusual storefronts without feeling swayed to impress through verboseness or vocabulary.  More debatable is whether such scenery is ever useful at all.  Several pages are spent chewing over an office’s bric-a-brac and resident canine companions for a character seen just once, for instance.

Grey’s focus usually returns to form quickly, snapping back to multilayered prose that is accessible for horror hungry audiences enticed by either bite-sized bits before bed or a full feast to be downed in one or two sittings.  An all-of-a-sudden conclusion inspires a hint of a “that’s all?” reaction, though this is a story where satisfaction comes from the eerie journey rather than its final destination.

In that regard, quiet reflections combined with intelligent frights from two unique perspectives make “The Apartment” an ideal choice for late nights alone or a red eye flight.  Particularly if that plane is headed overseas.  If the destination is a suspiciously unfamiliar Airbnb?  Even better.

Review Score:  80

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