"The Seven Visitations of Sydney Burgess" is a gripping horror debut that is hard to put down.

The set-up is simple enough. Sydney Burgess is assaulted in the process of a home invasion, experiencing severe head trauma, but she manages to escape. While in the hospital recovering, she learns that the intruder was found brutally murdered in her home, and she is the only suspect. (None of that is a spoiler, it is all included in the description/summary of the book). What follows, though, is a really great exploration of trauma, willpower, memory, and the power, and allure, of family.

The story is told entirely in the first person, with the remarkably unreliable narrator of Sydney. The supporting cast is mostly rounded out by her boyfriend Matt and her son Danny, with her ex and her boyfriend’s parents circling the periphery. Obviously, Sydney is the most fleshed out of the characters, and her personal story is well told, and while it deals with subject matters that could fall into cliches it mostly avoids them and instead offers an emotional connection to the person whose head we are living in. The other characters are well-constructed enough, especially Matt, that they don’t feel hackneyed or perfunctory, and they add to the emotional resonance of the story, but the journey really is Sydney’s to have, and they all are here to aid in that. First-person narrative can easily get tropey, but Marino manages to balance internal dialogue, observations, emotional experience, and engaging the other characters/environment well. He also commits to it, never pulling us out of the story for any third-person narrative or exposition dumps, and that is something I appreciated.

The book is told in a somewhat non-linear way. It is divided into seven major sections (the titular visitations), and each of these contains a handful of chapters. Each of the main sections moves chronologically, but within any section the chapters alternate back and forth. For example, chapter 1 will describe Day 1 morning, chapter 2 Day 2 morning, chapter 3 Day 1 afternoon, chapter 4 Day 2 afternoon, and so on, with the final chapters of a section making sure we are moving forward. In the first visitation this made sense, jumping back and forth between the attack and her time in the hospital when she was being questioned about the attack. When it continued in the second visitation I, at first, bristled at this literary device. I tried to think of the story as if it were told in a linear fashion, to see what was being gained by this technique, and as I kept reading I realized how wrong I was. The constant jumping back and forth, especially combined with Sydney’s unreliability (to herself as well as the reader) really helped me, as a reader, share in a sense of the anxiety and almost claustrophobia that Sydney, as she was fighting to recover her memory and have an understanding of what was happening to her, was experiencing. I came to find it a really effective means of keeping me both disoriented and also not able to put the book down between chapters, as it was juxtaposing cause and effect and forcing me to muddle through how things could be connected. As a reader we are never left sure of where we stand, what is real, and how we are supposed to feel about it. From within this we see Sydney take all the tools she has and not always make good decisions, but since we are as lost in the maelstrom as she is we are able to be sympathetic without having judgment, and in the end I found the structure a compelling narrative device.

The story follows Sydney’s struggle with past and ongoing trauma, as she desperately searches for who she can trust, including herself, as she tries to regain control of the life she has worked so hard to achieve. I won’t be spoiling the end of the book in this review, but I will say that it offers a satisfying ending that it did plant the seeds for the whole way through, but was still enough of a reveal that it was not my first guess at what was going on. It also didn’t save the reveals for the final chapter, it took its time to not only give a big reveal but then keep pushing forward, following the story where that reveal would naturally lead it. I will say that while I enjoyed the ride, I do imagine not everyone will be onboard with the ending, and I can’t say why without giving anything away that is best saved for the reading experience. I was down for it, I thought it was set up and then revealed well, and I felt the story, and its characters, followed their own emotional logic in a consistent way.

I don’t have a lot negative to say about the book. I don’t feel particularly compelled to re-read it, and being told entirely in the first person it does suffer from not being able to give quite as much backstory to other characters as would have been ideal. It gives enough to make them interesting and more than cut-and-paste stereotypes, and it wrings out as much as you can expect without breaking its first-person point of view. As I said, the reveal and the ending worked for me, but they might not float everyone’s boat. The language was evocative enough to give us a clear impression of Sydney’s experience, but didn’t feel a need to overly describe everything she saw and everyone she met. For me to give a five-star review a book generally has to be something I want to fall back into again, even if it is dystopian or violent or discomforting, and while I was eminently compelled by Sydney’s story and her journey I don’t feel compelled to start the journey over again. But I do highly recommend it for anyone who enjoys mystery and horror genres, and especially those who are interested in the experience of fragmented memory and how that both reflects and helps (re)reconstruct a sense of self.

A terrifying home invasion becomes a nightmare of lost memories and accusations of murder in this tense thriller. Sydney has her life on track, good job, nice home for her son and a kind and decent boyfriend. That all goes up in smoke when she opens the door to a masked intruder who knocks her unconscious. When she comes to in the hospital, she’s told she escaped through a broken window and summoned help. Sydney remembers none of it. The police aren’t buying her story, all they see is a man dead in Sydney’s home, killed in a way that makes them suspect she knew the killer and that his death was no accident. All the while, Sydney proclaims her innocence, and the fact that she remembers nothing, but as her memory slowly returns, she begins to realize she might not be so innocent after all