Book Review: The Book of Accidents

The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig


Ever watch a movie or read a book and grind your teeth wondering why the characters don’t just talk to each other and work things out? This might be an antidote for that. At its core, The Book of Accidents is about domestic abuse and its aftermath. Nate is the son of Carl, a very abusive man, who has agreed to sell the childhood home to Nate for a dollar. Nate is resistant, as he despises his father, but it’s a nice house on a lot of land and his wife Maddy and son Oliver think it will be better for them.

Nate, in some ways, is the key figure in this book even though it’s ostensibly about Oliver and Oliver’s special empathetic powers. Nate is a good father to Oliver, though you can see that it doesn’t come naturally to him and he’s struggled to learn how to keep his pain at bay. This choice–to be a good father–provides a razor thin advantage in the struggle of good versus evil.

As Oliver makes friends and enemies, he learns that he is the center of a supernatural convergence related to a long-dead serial killer with a thing for numbers. The premise is complicated, involving apocalyptic dystopias, alternate realities, magic art, time-travelling ghosts, and supernatural psychotherapy.

This book highlights one of the differences between fantasy and horror. While there are supernatural elements in this book, they don’t work together with the cohesion they would in a fantasy novel. In a fantasy novel, the magic generally works on established principles, and if the heroes bend those principles, they are doing so with scientific experimentation. This is more like Doctor Who magic, where someone realizes that magic happens during lightning, so they make a lightning rod and it all sort of works in wibbly wobbly timey wimey sort of way. That part of it was a bit unsatisfying for me. I couldn’t quite picture how people went between the worlds, how some people could make it work and not others, what the flat rock looked like, how the tunnel worked, etc. I like magic, but I want to picture the wardrobe leading to Narnia, I want to imagine saying “wingardium leviosa” and waving my own wand, I want to imagine drinking a vial with iron in it and flinging myself into the mists. This magic is more weird and too incomprehensible to satisfy me. I never got how the book of accidents figured into everything. They call it a magic spellbook, but how are the horrific accidents related to the magic tunnel? How did the deaths matter? Were we supposed to assume that of course the bad creature was a demon and deduce that people dying was its bread and butter? Were we supposed to deduce that the crazypants serial killer with a number fetish was onto something? Because I didn’t. I love magic, and it doesn’t matter if it’s weird, but I want to be told how the magic works.

What I did love is how the familial relationships played a central role in the conflict between good versus evil. Nate’s choice to be a good father is what gives Oliver the strength to fight evil. Maddy’s choice to be engaged and communicative gives Nate the support he needs to survive his childhood trauma. Oliver’s supportive parents give him room to save the world. This is what good looks like. It’s not like they just said “Oliver is good because he’s the true prince with the right lineage” it’s “Nate and Oliver and Maddy are good because they try hard to treat the important people in their life with love and respect and don’t carry the pain of their own childhood onto the next generation.” I haven’t seen that often in plot-driven literature, and it was a breath of fresh air.




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