John Tracker is hired to demolish his estranged family’s seemingly abandoned mansion. Before tearing it down, he pays a visit and realises it’s still inhabited. Oh, and the house is filled with mazes and booby traps designed to catch the Devil. After a while in the house, it becomes apparent that those traps may have fulfilled their purpose. The Well feels a bit like a Kafka writing a gothic version of Home Alone. The writing is good enough to anchor the story in coherency, but the house of the Trackers is two steps removed from reality. The Well is nightmarish in the most literal sense. It reads just like a bad dream.

It’s a fairly interesting idea for a book, and there were chilling passages and ideas, but the characters were too boring for this to be a great novel. The main guy comes from a weirdo family, but his only character traits are being strong and successful. These aren’t really endearing qualities. I would have liked him a lot more if he was a food vendor who was on the run for rescuing a kidnapping victim from a drug cartel. Give him a speech impediment or a gimpy leg or something… The basic story wouldn’t require huge changes for a change like this, and it might make the reader actually give a damn about the protagonist’s fate.

This isn’t a long book, but it feels dense. I could only manage a few pages before bed each night. A lot of the chapters start with a few paragraphs about dead members of the Tracker family. These were interesting as a literary technique, but didn’t add much to the main narrative. I definitely got the sense that Cady was a capable writer, but I felt like he would have been better off making his characters likeable than trying to be Faulkner. The Well comes close to being really, really good, but it’s exactly how close it comes to greatness that makes it feel so underwhelming. Still though, it’s a lot better than some of the crap I’ve had on here.