Eric
Read this during the pandemic but wanted to re-read it after watching the movie, to see if I remembered it right.
For anyone else who's going from movie to book, the movie is more literal than the book is about what the "bad thing" is that's going on. I'm not sure which is better: being clear (in the movie) that it's a multifaceted psychological warfare attack, or being a little unsure if the characters are simply letting their imaginations run wild about what's happening "out there." (The author does rarely allude to bad things happening elsewhere, but one could argue that the narrator is unreliable.)
It's definitely far-fetched, so prepare for things to not be fully explainable. The only explicit things that cause "bad things" to happen to the family are the very loud noises, which the author admits is just American war planes flying (huh?), and the tick bite, which -- is the author telling us that an enemy state released enough poison ticks across Long Island that both Archie and Danny's wife would both be bit and have their teeth fall out?
Really the book is about how unprepared most first-world people are for any broad disruption to their ways of life, and how pathetic they are in the face of it. At this, the author is both effective and proven correct by the COVID years.
"Ruth had learned only one thing from the current reality, and it was that everything held together by tacit agreement that it would. All it took to unravel something was one party deciding to do just that."
"Some people started to realize they'd had a naive faith in the system."
Read this during the pandemic but wanted to re-read it after watching the movie, to see if I remembered it right.
For anyone else who's going from movie to book, the movie is more literal than the book is about what the "bad thing" is that's going on. I'm not sure which is better: being clear (in the movie) that it's a multifaceted psychological warfare attack, or being a little unsure if the characters are simply letting their imaginations run wild about what's happening "out there." (The author does rarely allude to bad things happening elsewhere, but one could argue that the narrator is unreliable.)
It's definitely far-fetched, so prepare for things to not be fully explainable. The only explicit things that cause "bad things" to happen to the family are the very loud noises, which the author admits is just American war planes flying (huh?), and the tick bite, which -- is the author telling us that an enemy state released enough poison ticks across Long Island that both Archie and Danny's wife would both be bit and have their teeth fall out?
Really the book is about how unprepared most first-world people are for any broad disruption to their ways of life, and how pathetic they are in the face of it. At this, the author is both effective and proven correct by the COVID years.
"Ruth had learned only one thing from the current reality, and it was that everything held together by tacit agreement that it would. All it took to unravel something was one party deciding to do just that."
"Some people started to realize they'd had a naive faith in the system."