Book Review: Home Is Where the Bodies Are

Spoilers!

Familiar stranger. Jeneva Rose, in her latest book released at the end of April, Home Is Where the Bodies Are, captures the essence of familial bonds and fissures. Familiar stranger. Familiar precisely because we’re family, but that doesn’t mean we know members of our family in a more intimate way. Allen’s Grove, Wisconsin, an unincorporated community of not even 200 people, where Rose grew up and modeled her setting after, is a fitting throughline for the nostalgia evoked by the VHS-inspired cover of the book, and what propels the plot forward: a home movie of a family’s secret eternalized on a VHS tape from the summer of 1999. Allen’s Grove is like a cemetery, Rose tells us, where you only come back because of death. And death, incidentally, is often what draws “familiar strangers” back together.

So it is when the matriarch of the Thomas family, Laura, dies. Beth, the oldest child, was there when she passed with a final statement, letting Beth know that her father, Brian, who was thought to have disappeared seven years prior, didn’t actually disappear. Bewildering statement, in Beth’s estimation! Beth is divorced, working in the same factory her father did, and estranged from her daughter. Her younger sister, Nicole, has been addicted to drugs most of her adult life, and only a year prior, Beth told Nicole she didn’t want her around anymore, tired of dealing with the addict’s lifestyle. And finally, Michael, who made it out of Allen’s Grove to be a successful tech entrepreneur, returns in designer clothes and lots of money, as the youngest of the trio.

As with Rose’s other books structurally, she uses the storytelling devise of alternating between the perspectives of Beth, Nicole, Michael, and Laura in 1999. What was on the VHS tape the three discover while going through their mother and father’s things — their mom, like a lot of parents of the 1990s, used a camcorder to record many family happenings — is their parents discussing hiding the body of a missing local girl, Emma, who was killed. She’s not merely a local girl. When you’re talking a town of less than 200 people, she’s a neighbor, and in fact, was their across-the-street neighbor. Brian wants Laura’s help with burying the body and tells her it was an accident and they can’t call the police, but he won’t elaborate on either aspect. Laura does so out of love for Brian.

From that point forward, unless a remarkable twist occurred, I figured Michael killed Emma. Another element that favored Michael as the culprit: He was against giving the VHS tape to the police, and he was adamant about buying the house from Beth. He wanted to keep the secret, and Emma’s body, buried.

As secrets tend to be, they cause a lot of — perhaps you can say — unintended consequences. In this case, let’s run through what happens after Laura and Brian bury Emma:

• For one, their marriage and family is finished, at least as it once was, as seen through Laura’s eyes (which using the camcorder has her “eyes” is perfect), but it has material and psychological impact on the children, too.
• Brian takes the deceit further by trying to flag a the “local town creep” for the crime so people would stop searching for Emma. Laura counters this by putting Emma’s bike in plain sight, acquitting the town creep of the charges. Nonetheless …
• Emma’s father kills the town creep in a fit of drunken rage post-acquittal. To which, Brian, yet again, buries the body and doesn’t call the police.
• Not able to live with himself for what he did, Emma’s father kills himself.
• That act itself was the catalyst for Lucas, Beth’s high school sweetheart, breaking up with her. Like I said, Beth would go on to be divorced, and Lucas, for that matter, divorced as well.
• Another girl, Christie, who had vague issues with her family, is reported missing. Christie, similar in a way to Laura, was obsessed with documenting the world around her, but through photography. In so doing, she captured Michael pushing Emma to her death and trying to hide her body. With the photos, she blackmails Brian for money, a fake ID, and a new life out of Allen’s Grove and away from her family. Laura remarks that Christie is the only one who got a happy ending out of this.
• Later, when Laura is told by Brian the full story behind Emma’s death, and the suspicion that Michael pushed her, Laura and Brian are hell-bent on protecting him and more importantly, preventing him from killing again. They lavish him with gifts, love, and try to set him up on a good career path that takes him out of Allen’s Grove. All of which is to the neglect and detriment of Beth and Nicole’s upbringing.
• When Michael returns home after many years away, grieving the death of his girlfriend, Brian thinks he’s killed again. According to Michael (which is key), they get in a struggle and Michael kills his father, arguing it was self-defense. Michael, and in one final act of defending Michael, Laura, bury his body and then concoct the story of Brian randomly leaving the family and going to Mexico.
• And finally, all of this circles back after Laura’s death, when Michael nearly kills his two sisters in a bid to keep his secrets.

Laura confessed all in a letter she kept in a lock box for Beth after her death and said in part, “I’ve taken these secrets to the grave, but that’s as far as I can take them.” The pain caused by the secrets and the unfurling of those secrets in the course of the story after Laura’s death proved her right. Her death was the final, arguably necessary catalyst to bring light to the dark and buried past. I use “light” intentionally because Rose uses the sun as a recurring motif throughout the book. For example, how quickly the sun can set on the “perfect family,” as the Thomas family seemed.

Rose’s book, at a short 246 pages, doesn’t overstay its welcome, and owing to the small cast of characters, largely consisting of the siblings and Laura, means Rose can instead explore the nitty-gritty of these siblings and what life — and these secrets, albeit the sisters didn’t know about them — did to them. There is good, believable character work through Beth and Nicole’s inner thoughts, and the often raw, emotional dialogue between the sisters (and the sisters with Michael and vice versa). I particularly thought Nicole’s addiction issues, which itself could be a metaphor for the secrets we keep (because she is finally able to achieve sobriety after this whole ordeal), were well addressed by Rose.

Finally, the fact that I easily predicted the killer is actually a mark in favor of this book, not against, because I felt the twists in Rose’s other two books I’ve read weren’t as well-earned as Michael being the killer. Michael being the killer made sense, even if it was predictable. Sometimes predictable things are good! This was good.

What amused me while reading is the added context by Rose during her book tour for Home Is Where the Bodies Are that she’s self-admittedly not good at descriptions about people’s facial expressions and mannerisms. Throughout the book, the siblings essentially do a lot of shoulders-to-ears, brow bunching, or pulling back their lips. But that’s okay, Rose is self-aware about her weakness as a writer! And it didn’t detract from the book for me. In fact, having listened to Rose during her book tour and finding out that she’s written comedy before (TV or movie scripts, if I recall correctly, with her brother), I’m surprised she doesn’t insert more comedic elements into her books. I know these books are suspenseful thrillers, dealing with grief and the uglier elements of family, but she was quite funny and charming in person. I’m sure she can find a way to translate some of that levity into her books.

I’ve now read three of Rose’s book. This one, The Perfect Marriage, and You Shouldn’t Have Come Here, and I”m comfortable saying that Home Is Where the Bodies Are is my favorite book of Rose’s. It was nostalgic, interesting in her ruminations on family (“familiar stranger” is going to stick with me!), and had a good pace that kept me reading without sacrificing the integrity of the plot. I would certainly recommend this one to others, if you’re not up on Rose yet.