Are Your Parents Home? by Jon Athan

Brutal 5 stars

Truthfully, I don’t know how to review this. I’ve been sitting at my desk the last 5 minutes trying to craft a review that makes any lick of sense, but I’m not sure that I can.

Are Your Parents Home? is singularly the most brutal and visceral book that I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. As a young single woman, the fear and worry of a home invasion has niggled at the back of my mind ever since I first moved out of my parents’ home. It’s something that’s never far from my mind and leads me to check my doors several times before I go to bed every night. This book is everything I’ve ever feared of living on my own, of dying hard, of watching something horrible happen to people I care about and not being able to stop it.

Reading from Ella’s perspective and getting a first-hand look at the brutality and senseless violence heaped on her, her siblings and her friends filled me with so much anxiety and heartsick that I had to split reading the book across a couple of days just to ground myself from the fear practically leaking from the book.

Athan has a gift for writing scenarios that send your mind on a spiral from just the slightest possibility of the events ever occurring in real life. It adds another layer to the horror and gives that unpleasant jolt of reality to his stories that you have no choice but to take notice of. Each of his books that I’ve read has touched on a different part of my soul for his creatively savage imagery and his unrivaled ability to make me want to retreat from all humanity and live a hermit’s life behind a hundred different layers of security.

Respectfully, I’ll never read this again. Not because it was badly written or too extreme, but because it was so raw and unfiltered that it touched on my lizard brain too much and made every fight-or-flight instinct I possess stand to attention.