{"id":114394,"date":"2021-11-22T09:12:43","date_gmt":"2021-11-22T15:12:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ellisdownhome.com\/?p=114394"},"modified":"2021-11-22T09:12:43","modified_gmt":"2021-11-22T15:12:43","slug":"the-woman-who-saw-too-much","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ellisdownhome.com\/the-woman-who-saw-too-much\/","title":{"rendered":"The Woman Who Saw Too Much"},"content":{"rendered":"

Finn\u2019s 2018 thriller \u201cThe Woman in the Window,\u201d a Manhattan shut-in stalks the lives of her neighbors one window at a time.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Roll away Jimmy Stewart\u2019s wheelchair, upgrade his camera, further his timeline; give Hepburn back her eyesight, insert a glass of merlot, restore her from the basement to living areas; invite a neighbor to fire up Ingrid Bergman\u2019s gaslight, but not before they dispose of the charming Charles Boyer; recant all 32 accounts of Gene Tierney\u2019s electroshock therapy: And there she is, Dr. Anna Fox, our contemporary damsel, a mosh-pit of our favorite black-and-white characters, another remake.<\/p>\n

\u201cCan you beat a vanished corpse?\u201d Dr. Anna Fox asks herself before popping a palmful of post-traumatic pills into her mouth, probably squeezing<\/em> or chasing<\/em> them down her throat with one of her many glugs<\/em> or slugs<\/em> or sluices<\/em> of wine.<\/p>\n

\u201cAgoraphobia: in translation the fear of the marketplace, in practice the term for a range of anxiety disorders.\u201d<\/p>\n

TWITW<\/em>\u2019s protagonist, Anna Fox, is our unreliable narrator of choice for A. J. Finn\u2019s (pseudo for Daniel Mallory) debut novel. A thirty-nine-year-old child psychologist, self-prescribed\u2014self-harmed?\u2014to life inside her five-story brownstone in gentrified Manhattan with her family of one: one (phantom) husband, one (ghostly) daughter, one (moody) cat, one glass (bottle) of wine to calm her nerves, one pill (or 3) to keep her sane, one (potentially) murdered neighbor.<\/p>\n

\u201cLocked-in syndrome,\u201d she calls it, as though it were a genetic disposition or an inherited disability. Triggered by the same unspoken trauma that separated her from her family, Anna\u2019s recently acquired agoraphobia has been festering like that of an undiagnosable, terminal sickness. Cabin fever meshed with bone-deep paranoia. (We\u2019ve all been there, don\u2019t you think, given the wintry-alone seasons of life we have all spitefully endured as of late?)<\/p>\n

Though readers are presented with many inarguable, surface-level details that might suggest otherwise, Dr. Anna Fox is not your run-of-the-mill cat lady. \u201cWith a tumbler in one hand and a Nikon in the other,\u201d she stumbles about in her ghost-like home, floor to floor, room to room, marooned and forever-tipsy. Snapping candid photos of her neighbors, inventing conversations<\/em> between husbands and wives, speaking to herself through a preponderance of besotted quotes, and referring to everyday\u2014sober\u2014occurrences through the lens of a lonely addict. Saying things like: \u201cThe words stagger off my tongue like drunks from a bar.\u201d<\/p>\n

But\u2014at least she\u2019s self-aware.<\/p>\n

While Anna\u2019s imprisoned vocabulary often provides a foreboding\u2014if not stomach-turning\u2014catalyst to this thriller debut novel, A.J. Finn\u2019s unprecedented ability to turn persnickety details into patented character tropes is by far my favorite quality of his writing. Sentences embossed with character, both efficiently pithy yet remarkably dense, walk you through the mind of his protagonist as though the pages turn for themselves. A story on treadmill. Always scraping<\/em> her limbs across the hardwood floor, always dragging<\/em> herself into new positions, tripping<\/em> down to the kitchen. Slow, complacent, laze. And by page 30, you\u2019re either sick to your stomach or pouring yourself a glass of wine, agreeing with her, booze and all, peeking through a slit in your blinds and taking second glances at your neighbors, praying you catch them in the act.<\/p>\n

She may spend her days sifting dung from a litter box and critiquing her neighbor\u2019s lifestyles, but she has bottles of beta-blockers to take off such edges. She may be drunk by noon and forever lint-rolling dander from her clothes, but this stay-at-home sleuth is as cinephilic as she is agoraphobic\u2014and alcoholic, and paranoiac\u2014and lives every day as though she were a character starring in her own film. And her splurges of pills are only partially to blame for her blurry\u2014bleary?\u2014descriptives; for Anna\u2019s greatest vice is her love for classic noir and film-based cinematography. Films like Gaslight <\/em>and Rope<\/em> spinning in the background, quoting lines from Strangers on a Train<\/em> and Sudden Fear, <\/em>fantasizing Rear Window<\/em> scenes, and influencing her new teenage neighbor with a copy of Night Must Fall<\/em>. \u201cIt\u2019s a good one to start with,\u201d Anna promises. \u201cSuspenseful but not scary.\u201d<\/p>\n

Voyeur to the routines of her neighbors and the monochrome lives of Hitchcock characters, Anna\u2019s occasional domestic accidents soon appear not as messes to be cleaned, but scenes to shoot, wounds to bandage, bodies to bury, referring once to a dropped glass and a flare of merlot as if the wine itself were pouring out of a victim, flooding the veins of the stonework, black and bloody, crawling toward my feet<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Surveying the streets with her Opteka zoom she claims is better than binoculars<\/em>, Fox spies into the Russell\u2019s living room window just in time to see a knife plunge into the chest of her newest neighbor, Jane Russell. Dropping her camera to the floor, Anna watches Jane\u2019s hand scrape across the windowsill, her fingers drag lines through the blood<\/em>. Pages later, once the police have been summoned to her home, Anna relays the scene to Detective Conrad Little who, after questioning Anna\u2019s multiple empty bottles of wine and cartons of pills, believes her accusation to be nothing but a good, old-fashioned cry for help.<\/p>\n

Let the mystery begin.<\/p>\n

Readers attentive to the common tropes of foreshadowing and sleight of hand villains that mystery authors love to Tetris into their novels will find themselves spiraling with anxiety as if they too have missed a few high-milligram, anti-psychotic doses of their own:<\/p>\n

What happened to Anna\u2019s family?<\/em><\/p>\n

What happened to Jane?<\/em><\/p>\n

Is Anna crazy? <\/em><\/p>\n

Is Anna guilty? <\/em><\/p>\n

Is she right?<\/em><\/p>\n

Still pacing their homes, still spying on their neighbors, readers will sprint through the final chapters of TWITW<\/em> as if the words themselves might erase from the page, or disappear before their eyes. Hearts racing long after the last page when the story comes full-circle, tables turned, jaws ajar, the readers finally realizing that Anna\u2019s locked-room mystery was never a riddle meant to be solved, but a question to be answered:<\/p>\n

No\u2014You simply cannot beat a vanished corpse.<\/p>\n

– Trevor<\/em>\u00a0is a writer for\u00a0EllisDownHome.com.\u00a0Outside of writing and freelance, or bingeing some new HBO miniseries,\u00a0Trevor\u00a0is an avid runner, a disciplined workout partner, and a viciously competitive Spikeball player.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Finn\u2019s 2018 thriller \u201cThe Woman in the Window,\u201d a Manhattan shut-in stalks the lives of her neighbors one window at a time. Roll away Jimmy Stewart\u2019s wheelchair, upgrade his camera, further his timeline; give Hepburn back her eyesight, insert a glass of merlot, restore her from the basement to living areas; invite a neighbor to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":114395,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[256,51,255,175],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Woman Who Saw Too Much - Ellis DownHome<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/ellisdownhome.com\/the-woman-who-saw-too-much\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Woman Who Saw Too Much - Ellis DownHome\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Finn\u2019s 2018 thriller \u201cThe Woman in the Window,\u201d a Manhattan shut-in stalks the lives of her neighbors one window at a time. 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