The Unnoticeables

When a book starts as strongly as this one did, with a story that's attention-grabbing from page one, the disappointment for its failed promises hurts twice as much: this is what happened to me with The Unnoticeables, whose narrative arc... imploded (for want of a better word) two thirds of the way in.

The story runs on two different time tracks, separated by 36 years: Carey, living in New York in 1977, is a young man reveling in the time's punk scene, spending his days getting drunk, stoned--or both--and generally causing any kind of mayhem he can think of; Kaitlyn lives in Los Angeles, in 2013, as a part-time stuntwoman, part-time waitress trying, and so far failing, to bring her stunt work to the next level. Both of them are confronted by something that is both inexplicable and terrifying, something that possesses all the markers of a slowly spreading invasion.

The first inkling that something terrible is going on happens when Carey sees a girl he's interested in being attacked by what looks like a man-shaped oily mass: the thing acts like acid, consuming the unfortunate girl and leaving only bloody remains behind. Moreover, in the area where Carey and his friends prowl, some peculiar individuals start cropping up: they all appear good-looking and attractive, but as soon as one's eyes leave them, their features blur and no ones seems able to remember what they look like. Worse, whenever these people--dubbed by Carey "the Empty Ones" - manage to attract any given individual, the unfortunates disappear without a trace.

Kaitlyn, on the other hand, suffers from a more close-and-personal confrontation: at a party she meets Marco, former sitcom star and her teenage years' crush. Accepting a ride back home from the man, she's first appalled by his reckless driving and uncaring attitude, which make her think Marco is somewhat deranged, then he forces himself on her. More shocking than the sexual assault is its modality: Kaitlyn feels something metallic slide down her throat, and her strength and willpower being drained away. Saved by someone who bodily extracts her from Marco's car, she makes Carey's acquaintance: older, probably wiser but still tainted with his old recklessness, he's living like a borderline homeless, but he has information on the Empty Ones--and is willing to help Kaitlyn trace her friend Jackie who disappeared after that fateful party.

The novel's chapters alternate between Carey's past and Kaitlyn's present with a relentless pace that makes the book a compulsive read while we follow their scary journey of discovery: the two main characters are the best and strongest elements of the story, their voices persuasively true and their dialogue or thoughts evenly balanced between stark, dramatic reality and sarcastic humor. Carey comes across as the best defined one, though: the outrageous style of life he and his friends are pursuing should make them offensive, and yet there is a sort of wild abandon in Carey, tinged with the somewhat lucid awareness of what he is, that managed to endear him to me, and to make me root for him--especially when his rough attachment to his friends comes to the fore, almost belying his devil-may-care attitude.

Once Kaitlyn's disbelief at her new friend's revelations evaporates, the two decide to go on the offensive to try and save Jackie, and they pursue Marco's car in a mad motorcycle dash through the congested traffic of Los Angeles. They follow him to a mansion where a party is in progress, and though realizing that the place must be crawling with Empty Ones like Marco they decide to go in: this is where the story started unraveling and making less and less sense to me. For starters, I could not figure out what the two were trying to accomplish knowing they were vastly outnumbered by people (if one wanted to call them that...) who could not be hurt, harmed or stopped in any way. And then the real madness kicked in...

What had started as a horror story about strange beings preying on unsuspecting humanity, and the slow infiltration of the Empty Ones in various facets of society (the most chilling example being Kaitlyn's trip to the police station to denounce Marco's assault), suddenly morphed into something best defined as crazily grotesque: the dangerous environment of the hellish party is only the front for what happens in the closed back rooms, where blood-drenched orgies where every kind of imaginable (and unimaginable...) sex perversion gives way to a frenzy of horrific mutilations and killings, all of which with no apparent rhyme or reason, except maybe the author's penchant for imagining and depicting the most revolting and senseless acts of destruction.

At that point, only the desire for some sort of explanation kept me reading on, despite the appearance of even more gory weirdness in the form of a strange contraption to which the Empty Ones' victims were being fed, all in the name of a nebulous fight against entropy. Sadly, whatever form of explanation, or clue to understanding the bloody mess this story had turned into, was not enough to save this novel from the downward plunge it had taken in my consideration. I'm not even certain I entirely grasped whatever passed for explanation: the only thing I'm sure about is that I will not pursue this series further.