Where Horror and Literary Fiction Clash

The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi

Pages: 288 Genre: horror (shockingly)

Rating: 2 Star

Kindle Highlights

Anisa dreams of being a translator of great works of literature, but she's currently stuck subtitling Bollywood films while her wealthy parents pay her rent. Until she meets Adam, a language enthusiast who rivals those fluent in a language. After some prodding, he introduces her to the idea of The Centre, which is a ten-day intensive retreat that is guaranteed to leave you completely fluent in your chosen language. It's invite-only, very secretive, and very exclusive. She goes in with an open mind, but as she gets involved in the deepest secrets of the Centre, she learns that there's a lot more going on than meets the eye.

This book taught me a very valuable lesson about picking books to read just because there's a dramatic flower bouquet on the cover. I mean, I finished it, so it wasn't all bad, but I don't think it was particularly good either.

I really couldn't tell you anything that actually happened in the book. There was no plot, no story arc, no real throughline that we were meant to be following. I mean, honestly, I don't think I could even point to the climax. It was 280 pages of build up that led to the most abrupt ending ever. The book wanted to be (and was advertised as) a horror, but it really just read as literary fiction, which made it a bad horror story. But it was ultimately trying too hard to be a horror story that it wasn't a good literary fiction either! It was just nothing.

Things would also happen with no real consequence, and it was very hard to tell how I, as the reader, was supposed to feel about something. For example, the first thing Anisa learns about this place is how secretive it is. You have to sign an NDA with massive fine penalties, and you're only allowed to recommend one person. But Anisa immediately tells her friend. I'll let you take a guess as to how much this matters in the overall story. This happened constantly with various details mentioned throughout, which really just made the already-flimsy plot appear to be built out of a series of red herrings. This makes it hard to care about a story, since it ultimately means nothing matters.

When something did matter, the only reason I knew how to feel is because Anisa told me. The tension and suspense — key elements for a horror book, by the way — were never built naturally. Anisa told us something was stressful or scary or overwhelming or uncomfortable. Showing instead of telling would've served the book well.

The best part of the story were the political (for lack of better word) musings. Anisa had some interesting and insightful thoughts that, had they been given the right amount of space to breathe, could've been really engaging. I've read other reviewers say that the representation was bad, but I honestly don't care enough about this book to look into that too much (if you're interested, plenty of low star Goodreads reviews mention it). What I will say is that these musings were rarely as insightful as it seemed like the author thought they were, and if they were, they were abandoned very quickly. Since the book is about a translator, learning languages, and the social understandings surrounding these things, there should've been more page space dedicated to these discussions. Unfortunately, we instead got a lot of random and often hypocritical thoughts about things that didn't actually matter. It was as if the book was trying to impress me by how Woke it was.

I hate phrasing it like that; it makes me sound like a raging conservative. But that's how it felt — as if the book was trying to prove itself to me. Anisa would sometimes fully clarify her thoughts in order to justify them to me, which made her not much of a character and more of a mouthpiece for the author to preach to me through. And again, I know that makes me sound like a super conservative, but none of these musings were built in naturally. The plot would come to a halt so that Anisa could talk to me about, for example, the pitfalls of a heteronormative society in such a way that it felt like the author wanted me to be super impressed by how smart and aware she is.

And despite this, Anisa was a deeply hypocritical, judgmental, and short-sighted character. I can't tell if she was supposed to be likable or not, because unfortunately it's hard to get invested in a character whose main personality trait is "soap box." But she would be so harsh to others with no room for grace or leniency while giving herself all kinds of allowances. For example, she is very quick to call out everyone else's privileges in such a way that implies doing anything as a result of your privilege (ex: taking risks because you have the privilege of a support system) is inherently wrong. But she is living rent free because of her parent's wealth that affords her parents servants, and she never seems to really care about this. And the Centre isn't cheap, so I'm assuming her parents footed that bill too. I wouldn't be bothered by this — I love an imperfect and nuanced main character — but Anisa's complexities were never used to create a meaningful character, they were just there to be bothered by.

There was also some very random IDF support? Again, I'm not sure if this was a lazy way for the author to get us to distrust the character in question (I did a little investigating and it seems like the author is pro-Palestine currently at least). But it was so bizarre for Ms. Anti-Colonialism In Even It's Lightest Forms to not even acknowledge it? It's proof of this whole book being good concepts buried in poor explanations.

I wanted to like this book, because the concept was very cool. So many things would've improved it, but none of the interesting ideas were actually explored. At the end of the day, this book is entirely unforgettable.