Review: 'House of a Thousand Lies' by Cody Luke Davis
Pub. Date: 8/9/2022
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books
How far will some families go to protect their legacy?
Diana Wolf likes to think she has it all: a rock god husband, an empty nest, a wine cellar, and a dream home in the woods. Life is good. It has to be. But when she hires a cartographer, Kerry Perkins, to survey and map her estate in rural Tennessee, she pulls back a frayed corner of the lie that is her fairytale life. On his first night at Wolf Hollow, Kerry stumbles across a young girl's skeleton buried in the woods. But what really scares Diana is a familiar symbol carved into the girl’s skull: two wolves.
A week later, the cops are digging in her backyard. Diana begins to question how good her life really is. How good of a man is her husband and how good a father? She’s not the only one with questions. Kerry Perkins can’t shake what he saw in the woods that night. He suspects that Diana recognized that symbol, that she lied to the police; that someone is watching him, and that whoever it is, they desperately want him to keep his mouth shut.
His search for answers leads him to Pink, a deeply disturbed man obsessed with the Wolfs’ celebrity. Pink knows the family better than they know themselves—and he knows that the more he and Kerry dig, the more bones they will find.
Told through the eyes of multiple narrators, none reliable, this is a story about parents, the lies they tell their children, and the lies they tell themselves.
Sometimes a book tries to do the most. In House of a Thousand Lies Davis works his way through the Wolf family but does so by hopping between different moments in time and different perspectives. While this gives the reader as broad a view of his story, it also runs the very high risk of confusing your reader. There is Diana, the mother, who is a confused and confusing woman, consistently torn between the picture-perfect existence she wants and the messy life she has. There is also Kerry Perkins, a cartographer who is hiding more than you might expect but is in no way prepared for what others are hiding. There are Diana's two sons, deeply conflicted, very talented, and estranged. There is the fiancée of one of the brothers, who wavers between happiness and concern. There is Pink, who is way to obsessed with the Wolf family and, despite all his oddities, my favourite character. There is also an FBI agent and probably a few other narrators I'm missing out on. It is a lot to keep balanced as a reader, especially as the skipping back and forth in time was not always signaled clearly in my e-Book.
It was hard to figure out what exactly the main story was at the heart of House of a Thousand Lies, in part due to the various narrators. Is this a story about the unraveling of the dream of a perfect family? Is it about police trying to figure out a horrible crime? Is it about two nobodies trying to find the truth? All of these stories are fascinating and there are many amazing moments in House of a Thousand Lies that totally grabbed me. A lot of what Cody Luke Davis does in this novel are things I have never read in a thriller or suspense novel before and he has a knack for that fine line between the Gothic and Suspense genres that I adore. I think the main thing that didn't resonate with me for House of a Thousand Lies is that too much is happening and attempted. A strict editor could perhaps have removed some of the elements and extra storylines and extra details that, while interesting, mainly make for a very complex novel that is difficult to oversee, even after having finished it. However, I am absolutely on board with reading more by Cody Luke Davis who absolutely has an eye for the creepy and the fascinating and the human in the dark.
I give this book...
3 Universes!
House of a Thousand Lies does a lot, probably too much, but much of what it does is also excellent. If Davis sticks to a tighter storyline his next novels will be absolutely winners for me.
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