Review: 'Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six' by Lisa Unger
Pub. Date: 28/2/2023
Publisher: Legend Press
Three couples rent a luxury cabin in the woods for a weekend getaway to die for in this atmospheric and gripping locked-room thriller by New York Times bestselling author Lisa Unger.
What could be more restful, more restorative, than a weekend getaway with family and friends? Especially in an isolated luxury cabin in the woods, complete with spectacular views, a hot tub and a personal chef. The reviews are stellar.
But a deadly storm is brewing. The owner seems just a little too present. The chef reveals that the beautiful house has a spine-tingling history. And the guests have their own complicated pasts, with secrets that run blood deep. The perfect weekend is about to turn into a nightmare.
A week or so back I reviewed a short story by Lisa Unger, 'The Doll's House'. My main issue with the story was that it was trying to do too many things for a short story, overloading it with ideas and set-ups which couldn't be satisfactorily explored or developed in the format of a short story. After 'The Doll's House', however, I was curious about how Unger's ideas worked in a full-length novel, and I remembered I had her Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six (SCSS) gathering dust on my NetGalley shelf. I dove in to the almost 400-page book and by the time I hit 50% I had the sinking feeling we were dealing with the same issue here. In SCSS Unger was trying to do way too much, which sacrificed any nuance the characters or plot might otherwise have held. I am a fan of the type of thriller I like to call "snobby rich people getting what's coming to them", but I do still need these snobs to be worked out enough that I can properly loathe them, rather than mere pastiches I don't care for.
The below summary might include spoilers. I'll try not to spoil major things, but I also want to discuss some of the issues I had with the novel. As such, this is also a slightly ranty review. I can only apologise.
SCSS has a boatload of narrators, arguably too many. I guess Hannah is who you'd consider the protagonist. She is married to Bruce, a solid, quiet tech-type, and currently a stay-at-home mum for their recently-born child. Her brother, Mako, is also a tech-type, but a very rich one, who is married to Liza, who is into yoga. The novel begins at Christmas, where mysterious DNA-test packages appear for everyone. Mako has also organised a weekend getaway for the two couples, plus their childhood friend Cricket (sigh), who is into partying and Mako, and her new boyfriend Joshua, who's a wild card but also works in tech. Can you see a pattern here? The men are rich and smart, all working with "code" but it's never properly explained what they actually do. The women are either into children (Hannah), into vegan wellness (Liza), or an irresponsible party animal (Cricket). They are some of the blandest women I've read in a while, who never once felt like real women to me. We get all of the women's perspectives, although you can't really tell their POVs apart through the writing. We also get the same scenes retold through the different perspectives.
On top of that, we get the POV of the creepy host (Bracken), a mysterious stalker (not giving the name to preserve a plot which isn't actually really there), and a man called Henry. For the rest of the plot, let me say that both too much happens and nothing happens. The one story I actually somewhat cared for was Henry's perspective. He has a rough childhood and spends much of his early adulthood trying to figure out who his father is. His story is one about nature vs. nurture, about whether family is a choice you make or something you're saddled with, about whether you are your genes. There was good stuff there, which could have made for a quieter, but more impactful thriller. As SCSS stands, Henry is hardly relevant to the plot and yet somehow still the only thing I was interested in. The POV of the host is absolutely irrelevant, merely serving as a lukewarm red herring. All these POVs, six in total if I'm not forgetting one, kind of overload the plot, which isn't strong enough to be spread that thinly.
The plot itself is also filled to the brim with all kinds of ideas and tropes. At its heart, SCSS is, perhaps, a novel about the potential drama DNA-tests can cause, and thereby a novel about what family really is. But I was low-key grossed out by the way Unger seemed to position DNA/genes as some kind of curse? Some of the characters are deeply obsessed with what's in their blood, one even gets accused of being a eugenicist at some point, and I don't feel like Unger put enough thought into how she wanted to position this. Problematic ideas absolutely have a place in books, I'm not here to advocate for purity literature, but I want to get the feeling that the author at least knows how her depiction of those ideas comes across, and I did not get that feeling. I just felt slightly icky with some of it, as if the book was suggesting that some people have "dirty genes" or something and thereby become evil. The fact that this seemed kind of linked to race, although I am sure that was not Unger's intention, was just not good.
After reading both a short story and now a full novel by Lisa Unger, I both appreciate her willingness to go wild with plot and deplore her unwillingness to rein herself in for the sake of said plot. This novel wanted to be a "secluded cabin/locked room"-esque mystery, a family drama, a tech thriller, a discussion of #MeToo, and an exploration of female culpability in male misbehaviour. That is too much for one book, especially if we consider the weight of the two latter themes. While reading SCSS I could see where Unger wanted to go, what point she wanted to make about men and women, but because that conversation was drowned out by everything else, it just never got there. Instead, the scenes which addressed, even depicted, rape and sexual abuse/coercion, sat incredibly heavy with me and also gave me an ick. It is very important, especially in this day and age, to talk about how women might be enabling the wrong behaviour of their fathers, brothers, friends, partners, etc. towards other women. This deserves its own treatment, however, not shoved into an already overstuffed thriller plot here and there, because then it feels cheap or lands completely wrong. I want to reiterate again that I do not doubt that Lisa Unger intended for these themes to land a lot better than they did, but she or her editor should have seen how they got drowned in everything else.
I give this novel...
2 Universes!
Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six tried to do too much and none of it landed with me. While I'm sure other readers could enjoy this, I found it unbalanced, somehow too long as well as underdeveloped, and not careful enough with the themes it wanted to address. I will probably not pick up another Lisa Unger book in the near future. 2 Universes because I did finish it, rather than DNFing.
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