"The Watchers" riddled with loose ends, inconsistencies

The Watchers is another entry in what I call the sensory-deprivation horror subgenre, following Bird Box and A Quiet Place.

The former deals with creatures that drive you mad if you see them, while the latter focuses on the sense of hearing: If you make a sound, it will alert the monsters, with tragic consequences.

A.M. Shine’s The Watchers (the basis of a film by the same name starring Dakota Fanning to be released June 7) is a little different. You don’t know what the watchers look like. You can’t see them, but they can see you. It’s an intriguing premise, and one that obviously caught the eye of filmmakers, who are about to release a feature film based on the book. But the potential for a suspense-filled, edge-of-your-seat tale is undermined by the story’s erratic pacing and unanswered questions.

I enjoy action and narratives that propel a story forward, and there’s too little of each here for my taste.

Shine likes to build tension through detailed description and by getting inside his characters’ minds—methods that can be keep readers engaged if they’re woven into the framework of the story and essential to the plot. But if they bog the story down rather than moving it forward, they can have the opposite effect.

I’ll start with description.

In his descriptive passages (and there are plenty) Shine leans very heavily on similes: Out of curiosity, I searched my Kindle copy for the word “like,” and it came back with 559 hits. Through the first couple of chapters, the vast majority I counted were used in similes. Every author has a crutch or two or three. Some writers begin far too many sentences with prepositions. Others have favorite words. That’s all well and good, but when the reader starts to notice every time a writer relies on that crutch, it’s a good sign it’s being leaned on too heavily.

More frustrating to me, however, is that much of Shine’s description is superfluous: It doesn’t tell us anything important about the story, but seems to have been included for the sake of drawing mental pictures for the reader. That’s fine if it tells me something important; if it doesn’t, it just slows me down.

Shine bogs the story down even further with extended sojourns inside the characters’ heads. These too seldom involve new revelations about them or their situation. Rather, they tend to devolve into repetitive ruminations about how they relate to one another.

I’ll grant that there’s only so much you can do when your characters spend most of the novel trapped in a cubicle together in a dark forest. There’s going to be a sense of claustrophobia and people getting on one another’s nerves. But the characters aren’t completely trapped: They can venture outside the cubicle during daylight. Yet Shine devotes precious little of his narrative to alternative settings. In one particularly galling case, the main protagonist (Mina) seems on the verge of discovering something important about the forest environment—a pattern to the burrows. But Shine distracts us from this impending discovery by having her delve back into analyzing her three companions.

Even worse: The characters never use the pattern she discovered to actually do anything about their situation. It’s simply a dead end.

And the characters are so thoroughly stuck in their heads that, even when they find themselves in a life-or-death struggle where time is of the essence, Shine has them spend a lot of time speculating on what their lives will be like when they escape. That’s just not how most people react to extreme danger. In a realistic narrative, the characters wouldn’t be focused on what-if’s about a possible future. They’d be consumed with making sure they had a future—any kind of future—by surviving in the here and now.

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD

Until now, I’ve confined my critique to general points, but from this point forward, I’ll be dealing with elements of Shine’s story that are very specific. So if you don’t want to know what happens, by all means, please stop reading here.

His premise is that a few individuals have driven down a road and into a forest where their cars break down and smartphones stop working. In fact, nothing electronic works. Cut off from the outside world, they become sitting ducks for a race of creatures that dwell in the forest, intent on “watching” them and killing them if they don’t cooperate; perhaps even if they do.

We aren’t told why the electronics stop working; we are merely asked to accept it. Are the monsters in the forest responsible, and if so, how? Is the forest itself a “dead zone”? We’re never told.

We are also asked to accept, later in the story, that a history professor has set up computers and surveillance cameras deep in the forest that mysteriously do work. There’s no explanation for why that’s the case, either.

In crafting his narrative, Shine tries to blend together two distinct kinds of story: In the first, the creatures appear to be mindless, ravenous monsters that salivate over the prospect of killing their prey if they venture out of their protective “coop” at night. But they’re also portrayed as watching (and studying) their captives, because they have the ability to mimic a human’s appearance and are, it seems, trying to perfect this ability so they can become undetectable.

This ability seems like nearly an afterthought through much of the book. Yet near the end, it comes suddenly to the fore when we find out, in the very last sentence, that some of the creatures have become so adept at mimicry that they have infiltrated human society. To what purpose? We’re never told. Do they want to use the element of surprise to catch and kill human prey? Do they want to become more human themselves? Do they want to take over the world?

If Shine’s just trying to set up a sequel, he’s certainly left enough loose ends to set one up.

Indeed, for all the time Shine spends inside his characters’ heads (and on an extended section of exposition near they end), he leaves a host of questions unanswered in terms of their motivation.

The history professor, whose wife passed away a few years earlier, came to the forest to conduct research on the creatures and used hired help to construct an observation center. He brought with him a photograph of his wife, which one of the creatures—one capable of surviving during daylight—used as a basis to mimic her appearance. She even takes the dead woman’s name, “Madeline,” and sets up residence inside the observation center, or “coop,” either during or following the professor’s departure.

The relationship between the professor and the creature is never explored. At one point, the author states that he actually constructed the “coop” as a home for the creature, but this is at odds with the idea, suggested elsewhere, that he built it as an observation center. And why the creature should need a home outside the burrows where her fellow creatures dwell is never explained, either. Is she in league with them, or is she an outcast because she’s different? And why is she different?

The loose ends just get looser.

The professor is, if anything, even more of an enigma than “Madeline.” He only appears in the story via a videotape that he’s left in a bunker beneath the coop, wherein he provides the captives with a means of escape and implores them to destroy all his research on the creatures back at the college.

The captives readily agree to this request, but their unquestioning assent makes no sense. They’re supposedly worried that, if others learn about the creatures, they’ll come to the forest to seek them out. The author states this explicitly, yet this idea left me scratching my head. Who goes to a dark forest looking for a monster? Wouldn’t it make far more sense to alert others to the danger so they could avoid it, especially since the captives themselves had been trapped in the forest because they themselves hadn’t known of the danger?

If there’s a road into the forest, where these creatures are said to have lived for centuries, that would seem to indicate that hundreds of people must have already wandered into the trap. The idea that they had lived there for centuries and their presence was still a mystery stretches credulity beyond the breaking point. The author wants us to accept that large numbers of people have disappeared over centuries and no one has bothered to investigate?

Maybe medieval humans had done so… and had simply gone missing themselves. But in the modern world, when people disappear, the authorities get involved. They look for patterns. If their investigations produce further disappearances, they redouble their efforts. In a case like this, when things got bad enough, the government would have called in SWAT teams and military units, dropped bunker-busting bombs on the creatures’ burrows, or burned down the forest. They would have done something to eliminate the threat.

None of this is even suggested.

Nor do we know what happened to the professor after he made the tape. If he killed himself, no body is ever discovered. If he allowed himself to be taken by the creatures, the author never says so, let alone explains why he would have simply given up. He was well protected and had ample supplies inside the bunker. He stated that he was too badly injured to take the escape route he reveals on the video, but why not wait and hope the injury heals? None of this is ever addressed.

The professor’s relationship to the creature “Madeline” is never explained, either. If he was kindly disposed toward her, was it because she provided some sense of solace by taking on the appearance of his wife, as on “The Man Trap” episode of Star Trek? Or was he simply afraid of her?

And what was her attitude toward him? It’s never stated and hard to discern from the story, which presents “Madeline” as both unforgiving and surprisingly helpful to the humans in the coop. They never quite know what to make of her. She assists them in escaping the forest, perhaps, the author suggests, because she’s learned all she needs to about how to mimic them. But why does she leave them alive once they’ve served their purpose?

Her attitude toward her fellow creatures is similarly ambiguous. She protects the captives from them, and even warns Mina about them in the end, yet she also is intent on protecting them by insisting that Mina go to the university and destroy the history professor’s research; even threatening her life if she fails to keep it secret. This leaves open the question of why “Madeline”—who by now has learned how to mimic Mina’s appearance—didn’t steal the files from the university and destroy them herself.

If the author would have only let us inside “Madeline’s” head the way he let us see the thoughts of the other characters, we might have learned the reason(s) for this ambiguity, but he doesn’t do us that courtesy.

At the end, “Madeline” suddenly discovers that she isn’t the only one of her kind (with the ability to accurately mimic humans and survive daylight). It’s weird that she didn’t know this earlier, especially in light of her apparent familiarity with the creatures and how they operate. Not surprisingly, we never get an explanation for this, either.

It’s just another loose ends in a frayed tapestry of a story that could have been a whole lot better.

One final issue I had with this book was the number of errors I found. I am not one to hold authors’ feet to the fire for the occasional typo. Everyone makes mistakes, and not every author can afford a first-rate editor. However, I do have a problem with errors that appear in books successful enough to be adapted into motion pictures.

For instance, a sentence in Chapter 9 reads that “the woman’s poise was not one of action.” I’m sure “pose” was meant here. The very first sentence of Chapter 7 begins “Daniel was sat…” Oops. And then there’s, “Daniel came to believing” (rather than “to believe”), in the same chapter.

If this book was published by a traditional house, its editors and proofreaders did a piss-poor job of catching typos. If it was published independently, the author has had enough time to fix it (considering the book was published in 2022) and certainly has the wherewithal to go back and do so.

My only question now: In this rare case, will the movie actually be better than the book?

Stephen H. Provost has more than 30 years of experience as an editor and is the author of more than 50 books, including the horror collections Nightmare’s Eve and, with Sharon Marie Provost, Christmas Nightmare’s Eve. He does not typically post critical reviews of fellow authors’ works, and will not do so under any circumstances on review sites, but he makes an occasional exception in blogging about highly successful authors’ works.