"We Need To Do Something" and Raven Knowing What To Do

I'm seeing a pattern in my reading now. It seems short horror novels and anthologies are what's keeping me reading this year while I work through my non-fiction reads. I picked up a copy of We Need To Do Something thinking that I could finish it in a day. I was right so it looks like this will win the quickest read of 2024. Now how did it actually measure up? Let's get into the details.

We Need To Do Something is a horror novella written by Max Booth III. The simple description on the back reads "A family on the verge of self-destruction finds themselves isolated in their bathroom during a tornado warning." The book wastes no time starting us off with that exact premise. Admittedly this premise was exciting enough to me. In theatre, I loved writing and performing small space scenes where characters are stuck together for whatever reason. It is the perfect way to build tension (similar to the "one-bed" trope but with a different kind of tension wink wink). So trapping a dysfunctional family in a bathroom together is a level of discomfort and proximity most of us could not handle. In just under 200 pages we remain confined to this one space with only the slightest glimpses of the outside world. Now some more serious spoilers are coming in.

We see the classic dysfunctional family in this; Parents who don't love each other, a father who is an alcoholic, a mother who no one understands, a teenage daughter who no one understands and is keeping secrets, and a younger sibling who is gross and annoying. Our narrator Mel seethes in her resentment towards her family and being stuck in this situation while in the background of her thoughts, her relationship with her secret girlfriend has fallen apart right as the storm hits. The family immediately loses power and contact with the outside world. The storm closes out by knocking a tree into the house which makes it so the door to the bathroom cannot be opened enough to escape. The family must sit and wait for rescue without losing it on each other.

Now here comes my first major complaint. The suspension of disbelief in this novella is high. Higher than a book can normally ask of you. When watching a movie our suspension of disbelief is a lot higher because we are seeing it with our own eyes. When we as readers have to picture something ourselves we are not as willing to be fanciful and more likely to question why things are that way. For a family that seems this stressed about money, they sure do have an obscenely large bathroom. Large enough that two adults, a teenager, and a child can all sit down and play Mexican Train. On top of all that their door isn't right. Now maybe I'm biased but based on the reviews other people did take issue with this too. The bathroom door opens out into the other room rather than into the bathroom. This again makes the bathroom larger and is an architectural choice that leaves me with tons of questions. Based on the GoodReads reviews other people found this odd. I'm also left questioning what the Hell this door is made out of. At almost no point is anyone really trying to break down the door or even remove the door from its hinges. These are all options I would consider before just lying down and dying of starvation in a bathroom. We don't even really see an attempt to break down the door until the final few pages. It did remind me of a time my family had to shelter in a storm and we had put our dogs in the guest bathroom while we crammed into the master. Our untrained foster dog did not like this and she attempted to tunnel through the door and was almost successful. So I'm wondering what type of solid oak doors were installed wrong in this family's financial burden manor.

Just your typical bathroom in your typical home

Moving forward this book starts off very ground and then tries to get into more supernatural horror. The family starts talking conspiratorial as no rescue has been made in a few days. They encounter what they think is a dog. They can't see it because of the tree but can pet it by reaching around. The dog thing then starts talking and trying to bite Mel's hand off. She rips out the thing's tongue as the creature retreats. This provides the family with a small food source that most of them can't stomach and that gives us some convenient hints towards "what is really happening". Mel continues to monologue internally about the suffering she is enduring mixed in with bits of her family causing problems. Let's talk about the obnoxious problem her brother.

Her brother is meant to be an immature child who is babied by their mother and favored by the father. Aside from him liking board games however his main personality trait is toilet humor and boy does it get old really fast. I understand the author wants to highlight the tension and the family getting on each other's nerves, but this character could have done that in so many ways that the constant barrage of fart and butt jokes seems so grossly unnecessary. They already made the kid whiny and obsessed with overly complicated board games, so much so that he brought them all into the bathroom. He didn't need potty humor to be more annoying. There is a good chunk of this book where you will not go two pages without someone, mostly him, talking about butts or farts. In a dark way, it made his death a kind of sigh of relief. I really don't like saying that, but no more fart jokes for the remainder of the book was such a plus. Its too bad the ending didn't hold up.

Her brother dies from being bitten by a rattlesnake that had slithered its way into the bathroom. The death is quickly mixed in with so many other levels of grief and trauma that it feels like such a side note. Maybe that's why I don't care very much that he dies. It's after his death that Mel confesses to doing witchcraft with her secret girlfriend Amy. There is a lot of build-up to what they actually did, but essentially they did a spell they found off of Redditt. This would be funny if it wasn't meant to be taken so serious. They first did a spell using a dog's tongue (see the magic of foreshadowing) to stop a classmate from bullying Mel's girlfriend, Amy. The spell ended up killing the classmate and yet this did not deter them from further magic use as they performed a necromancy spell on her girlfriend. Now for added context, they are convinced Amy was at one point dead or has a dead spirit inside her that needs to be removed. This is the usual edge-lord teenager stuff that most of us recognize, but seemingly the novel wants to legitimize it in the narrative. Most of it just makes me cringe at my old emo phase.

I will say once this confession from Mel of dabbling in witchcraft comes forward the book starts to unravel. It's unclear what's real anymore and that makes the story feel like it's being put through a hydraulic press. Too many dreamlike scenes occur and it's unclear what the consequence of anything will be. Her brother is a rotting corpse in the tub and her father has gone stark raving mad. This all culminates in the final pages in which the mother, half dead and starved makes it out of the bathroom only to come crawling back, cradles Mel, and continually assures her "everything is going to be okay". The ending falls flat. Up until the final maybe 20 pages I was hooked. Even with all the weird stuff, including something I left out for this review, I held on to the potential this story had.

This isn't to say it was all bad. I was hooked by everything in this story until the end. I felt like the suspense and confusion held up well. The fluidity of time made the story first step into the realm of weird horror. And while it's true I found the characters annoying they were all written very true to how they would be in real life. Or at least how we tend to see them. The concept itself is perfect for horror, but the author needed to lean more into it. If anything this weird awful bathroom should have been smaller, making them really suffer.

Final Rating 2/5 Stars. The ending was such a letdown that it's hard to forgive the earlier transgressions. I loved some things about it but it didn't outweigh what I took issue with. I seem to continually go back to the same idea of "why didn't they do..." and that is something you have to take into consideration when writing small space scenes or stories. This has been turned into a movie and honestly, I think it could work better as a screenplay. I don't know yet because I haven't watched it, but it might be a better format for this. I want to give this author another chance because there is so much about his writing that is good and works well. This just wasn't it for me.