Few things in literature are more disappointing than unfulfilled promises. If you sit down for a self-described tense, page-turning thriller and end up getting a slow-paced character study with the slightest dash of murder and intrigue, you might find yourself a bit disappointed. Unfortunately, Emily Ruth Verona’s Midnight on Beacon Street suffers greatly from this issue. While billed as a tense home invasion thriller, Midnight on Beacon Street ultimately delivers a quiet rumination on anxiety wrapped around an oddly nonlinear narrative that never really builds to anything. Equal parts enthralling and frustrating, Midnight on Beacon Street soars in its quieter, character-driven moments but otherwise feels more like a meandering stroll than a tense thrill ride.
A Home Invasion Like Most Others
Meet Amy, your typical seventeen-year-old babysitter with a healthy dose of anxiety and a love of horror films. On this fateful night in October 1993, she finds herself looking after the Mazinski children – Ben and Amy. They’re quiet, well-behaved kids who live in a quiet, unassuming neighborhood. Nothing bad ever happens in places like this – unless you’re in a horror movie. And yet, the town’s plagued by a cat burglar who, inevitably, arrives on the Mazinski’s doorstep. And, as any babysitter would, Amy tries everything to keep her wards safe and survive this dangerous night. On the surface, Midnight on Beacon Street looks like any number of similar home invasion stories. You’ve got the doey-eyed babysitter, oblivious to the dangers of the world. You’ve got the adorably precocious kids the sitter’s tasked with looking over. And you’ve got the ever-present threat lurking just on the edges of the story.
But what makes Midnight on Beacon Street differ from the likes of Halloween or When a Stranger Calls is that the narrative seems wholly uninterested in following the usual formula of a home invasion story. The book opens with a murder and then spends the next 85% of the page count building up to that murder. In fact, Midnight on Beacon Street hardly feels like a thriller at all. Sure, it’s occasionally tense; but mostly, it’s not. Instead, it offers a very meandering stroll through an unusual night in this quiet neighborhood. Most of the tension comes from the reader’s knowledge that something disastrous is going to happen at some point. But the novel spends very little time foreshadowing that horror – or even building up to it. It’s a narrative less about its plot and more about its characters – for better or worse.
A Rumination on Overcoming Anxiety
Outside of a few off-handed references here and there, Midnight on Beacon Street reads far more like an introspective rumination on anxiety than it does a traditional home invasion thriller. And that’s both a good thing and a bad thing. On the positive side of things, that exploration of anxiety is easily the novel’s greatest aspect. There’s something immediately relatable about Amy. About the way she feels so hopelessly trapped by her fears, so unable to squash them down that they end up controlling her day-to-day life. And there’s even something relatable about her love of horror movies, about how the structured fear in them distracts her from the unstructured fear of her reality. All of this gives Amy a real sense of groundedness. She feels like a babysitter you might meet in your real life, and someone you want to see overcome their fears.
Verona spends much of the book contrasting Amy and Ben’s respective anxieties with each other, really diving deep into their psyches. Amy sees a lot of herself in Ben. She so desperately wants to help him, to take his worries and fears away from him. But how can she when she can barely control her own? It’s all fascinating, enveloping character work. Honestly, it’s quite impressive how deeply Verona explores her characters in such a small number of pages. But that exploration comes at the expense of the overarching narrative, of the thriller itself. Instead of ratcheting up the tension and raising the stakes, the book spends most of its time ignoring the fact that it’s a thriller at all. It’s a horror movie where the murder doesn’t happen until the final ten minutes.
A Nonlinear Narrative that Never Fully Comes Together
Making things more complex is Verona’s use of nonlinear storytelling. On the surface, it’s a clever idea. You start with the big, climactic murder, and then jump backwards and forwards around that murder, exploring all the events that led to it and everything that happens after it. It’s very How to Get Away With Murder in a way. Except, that’s not what Verona does in Midnight on Beacon Street. Instead, the vast majority of the story takes place before the murder in the first chapter. And there’s never any real logic as to why the narrative keeps jumping around in time. There’s no build-up, no connection between the scenes on a deeper level that helps make sense of the story. Imagine if Memento played out without the cohesion of the dual timelines eventually converging at the climax, and you’ve got Midnight on Beacon Street in a nutshell.
The two timelines neither move consistently through time nor do they ever converge in a satisfying moment toward the end of the story. Instead, they just serve to break up the monotony of the story, to give readers a chance to jump back and forth between Amy’s point of view and Ben’s. On the surface, telling a home invasion story like this is a great idea, but the execution leaves a lot to desire. Nonlinear storytelling can often result in very tense, captivating stories. But here, it just makes the book feel a bit listless and unfocused. You can see what Verona was going for, contrasting Amy and Ben’s anxiety with each other, and using that as the crux of the narrative. But it never really comes together in the end.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, Midnight on Beacon Street is one of those books where you can easily see what the author was going for while recognizing it never really gets there. On the one hand, it’s a home invasion thriller with a severe lack of thrills, chills, or scares. But on the other hand, it delivers an engaging, emotional rumination on overcoming grief. Where it suffers is in the way it tries to combine its thriller tendencies with its quieter emotional center. As a thriller, it’s a disappointment. But as a character study, it keeps you glued to the page, eager to see how everything plays out.
Ultimately, your enjoyment of Midnight on Beacon Street depends on what you’re expecting from it. Go in expecting Halloween or When a Stranger Calls and you’re bound to be disappointed. But go in with the right expectations, and you’ll probably have a good enough time.
Midnight on Beacon Street is available now in paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Harper Perennial.
Disclaimer: A review copy of Midnight on Beacon Street was provided by the publisher. All opinions are the honest reactions of the author.
While billed as a tense, home invasion thriller, Emily Ruth Verona's "Midnight on Beacon Street" reads more like a slow-paced, introspective character study. The pacing's uneven and the nonlinear structure distracts more often than it works, but the character work just about overcomes these struggles. As a thriller, it's almost entirely devoid of any thrills or chills. But the characters are engaging, and Verona's writing is captivating enough to keep you glued to your seat anyway.
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GVN Rating 6.5
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