Read This: Eye Contact

Eye Contact, Selene dePackh’s new mosaic novel, is an intricate, otherworldly web of motives and intentions, of tenuous connections and broken threads. Its horrors are inspired by real, systemic abuses rampant in mental health care. DePackh introduces a handful of characters, living, dead, and trapped between, who are connected across seven interlaced stories by the unquiet spirit of a girl who died without ever having been allowed to live as she truly was. Her  penance–and retribution–is to tell all their tales.

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Ghosts, shapeshifters, witches, and human monsters walk the halls of the Taconic Behavioral Health Center, a sprawling complex that has been a terrible place for a very long time. The devil hides in plain sight here, ready to make it worse. The punishments meted out over decades to the people locked inside have poisoned the whole area with their cruelty. The men and women in charge of the place use their power to sate their own appetites. Their victims escape in the only way they can.

DePackh writes of her characters’ inner lives with precise and cutting detail, exposing the damage the world does to those who cannot conform. In Eye Contact, she weaves together human suffering and supernatural revenge to create a disquieting and emotionally complex story cycle that explores fraught relationships and unhealed wounds. DePackh skillfully describes the love, sorrow, fear, and rage that drive her characters, and lays open their deeply conflicted hearts. When they choose to share their secrets with the living they also share their pain. It is retaliation, if not redress, for what they have had to endure.

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Of all the stories here, the one that stands out most clearly for me is the last. It completes the mosaic with an elegy to the central character and her burden of regrets and painful glimpses of what might have been.

Beautifully written and keenly felt, I recommend Eye Contact highly.