You Should Have Left
2016 • 128 pages

Ratings34

Average rating3.4

15



Translated horror novella about a screenwriter who rented a house in the mountains with his family trying to finish his next screenplay but   has trouble with remembering the layout of the house and with what he wrote in his journal. Me after finishing this book, looking like the emoji I with swirling eyes (😵‍💫) literally starring at the wall wondering wtf did i just read.. Soooo this was a very quick read (technically could be done in one sitting), and I preferred the atmosphere and plot rather than the characters which were more annoying than compelling. I do like time/space glitches in fiction especially when it's treated as horror, and I feel here the nightmarish atmosphere was perfectly rendered by the author. 
There was a nervous and anxious energy to the writing: no quotation marks, short sentences, cuts in the middle of a sentence, the repetition of words, fragments of phrases mixed together, no commas etc all contributed to make this reading experience even more dizzying, to parallel what happens to the main character.
Overall great psychedelic horror atmosphere but I didn't care about the characters. I'm curious to see how the movie adaptation looks like. 

May 14, 2025