Book Review: Give Unto Us by Justin Lutz

“He gave it everything, and it still wouldn’t take him.”

📚

Trevor and Melissa Davis and their two-year-old son, Brody, need a fresh start. Tired of their tiny, noisy city apartment, they find a cozy, spacious, river-adjacent home in a nice neighborhood that calls to them, that literally beckons them to leave their problems behind and begin anew. For Trevor, it represents hope: an opportunity to reclaim happiness and develop evasive fatherly affection. To recapture the joy, communication, freedom, and kinship he shared with his wife before Brody came along. But when the house turns out to be more of a fixer-upper than anticipated, Trevor’s frustration quickly grows, culminating in the discovery of a strange sandpit in the backyard, a hole far from a benign buried sandbox or septic tank. Sinister, possibly sentient, and deeply rooted.

Give Unto Us is a story of purpose, choice, expectation, and the hell of wasted hopes, elusive dreams, and other people — the dishonest, parasitic, and publicly performative who gossip, backstab, lie, and delight in others’ sorrows, difficulties, and failures: disingenuous realtors, nosy neighbors, annoying coworkers, rowdy patrons, needy children, humanity at large. A guilt-laden nightmare where dread and shame undermine true love and cause alienation, isolation, silent suffering, and, at times, necessitate escape via substance abuse.

It’s also an examination of humanity’s hidden horrors and flaws: fears, wants, desires, and weaknesses. The drive to constantly do and make in the face of mortality — the all-encompassing, ever-siphoning hourglass — and the definitive lack of control and potential pointlessness of it all. Of being bound and forced into a self-sacrificial existence, and the despair and obsessive impulses that come with futile resistance. Filled with gnarly, gag-inducing body horror, it’s a visceral, shudder-worthy possession horror experience that lays life’s putrid underbelly bare, exposing the inner void borne of views and wishes that don’t conform to societal norms.

This novella embodies propulsive writing at its best, its pull as magnetic and consuming as the hole’s mysterious and savage call. It’s a resonant and imminent train wreck from which the reader can’t look away, a brutal give-and-take rife with tension and turmoil, gorgeous prose, believable characters, cutting humor, shocking violence, tragic and portentous histories, and appalling gore. One where circumstance seals fate and what could have been is rendered shadow, reality an unforgiving quicksand.

Thank you to BookSirens and Ghoulish Books for providing an eARC of this forthcoming novella for review consideration. It’s a compelling and addictive tale that makes this reader eager to devour more of Justin Lutz’s work!

❤Amanda