I picked this up from the rolling dollar shelf outside S.W. Welch's. Like many others, I thought it was going to be a fun, cheezy 80s horror thriller. Instead, it turned out to be more of a deep and interesting social and psychological thriller that was quite moving and not that scary. It's a story of a retired couple living outside a northeastern U.S. country town who end up weirdly sort of adopting this semi-feral young man. At first he lives in their basement, but they eventually invite him upstairs. He is strong and super competent, but also barely civilized and clings to them like an animal that eventually becomes suffocating and scary. At the same time, they defend him from the small-minded townsfolk and things start to get tense inside and outside their household. If you want a more detailed synopsis (and a good review), you can
find it here.
In the first third, it tended to drag a bit for me, but I think much of that was my confused expectations (thanks to that cover). Once I kind of got where it was going, I was pretty hooked. It ended up being quite intense and sad. Part of me was like "just have an open and honest conversation!" and trying to blame the 70s but then I looked around me and realized the truths in Crawlspace about fear and ignorance and not saying stuff are depressingly realistic.
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