Genre: Thriller/Horror
Premise: An overworked mother, frustrated with the lack of duty-sharing in her marriage, gets wrapped up in a community of career-focused women who may be turning their husbands into mindless robots.
About: Author Chandler Baker is primed to make a lot of noise in Hollywood. Not only did her werewolf short story just sell, but this book of hers was snatched up by producing powerhouse Plan B, with Kristin Wiig attached to play the lead.
Writer: Chandler Baker
Details: about 340 pages
I picked this book up the second I finished short story Big Bad, which I loved. The thing I noticed about Chandler Baker while reading that story was: THIS GIRL CAN WRITE. There’s a difference in her writing compared to some of the trash you see gumming up the 405 and the 10 here in Hollywood. She’s got real talent.
So it didn’t take much convincing for me to read this. Let’s find out if it’s movie-worthy, though.
Lawyer and pregnant mother Nora Spangler lives in Austin, Texas with her occasionally annoying but, overall, sweet husband, Hayden. Now in her second pregnancy, Nora needs help every day doing things. But Hayden only casually offers that help. It’s getting to the point where Nora is pissed. She can’t do EVERYTHING herself.
The two are thinking of moving to a nearby pristine housing community called Dynasty Ranch. Nora, in particular, is enamored with the area because it has so many high-profile working women there. Not only that, but all of the husbands are super helpful! One even stops to help her when she gets a flat. And when she meets one of the ladies, she notes that *her* husband is eagerly cleaning out her closet!
Nora is more sold on the home but Hayden’s skeptical. So they’re not buying anything right away. However, while there, a woman named Penny recruits Nora to look into a devastating house fire that not only burned down her house but killed her husband. Nora accepts the case and starts investigating.
Not long after, one of the more popular women in the community, Cornelia, a psychiatrist, nudges Nora to do couples therapy with her. She has a unique method that has transformed the community as nearly every couple in Dynasty Ranch gets along great. Nora thinks Cornelia is a little weird but decides to give it a shot. And, to her surprise, Hayden takes to it well. He almost immediately becomes more helpful around the home.
The deeper Nora digs into this house fire, the more she suspects foul play was involved. Could someone have been… murdered? As soon as she starts operating on that theory, Cornelia becomes squirrely. She interjects whenever Nora wants to speak directly to Penny. Eventually, Cornelia admits that she has a bigger goal – one that involves deprogramming men and women until they reset back to their natural identities, identities where women are the breadwinners changing the world, and their men live to support them. What will this mean for Penny and Nora? I can tell you that when you live in Crazy Town, like Cornelia, you will do everything to make sure your vision is accomplished.
A big reason this sold was because it was pitched as a female-centric Stepford Wives. It’s kind of like Get Out in that way. Base your social horror concept around an old 70s movie and add a twist. I find it to be a great pitch. If I was a producer in the room and someone pitched me this idea, I would be excited. Especially 3 years ago, when this book was written.
But I’m not sure Chandler Baker was able to wrangle that concept into an exciting enough story.
She makes an interesting choice right off the bat. 99 out of 100 writers would’ve had Nora and Hayden buy the house in Dynasty Ranch within the first 30 pages. But they don’t buy the house. The connection between Nora and Dynasty Ranch is, instead, explored through this arson case. And I’m not sure that was the best idea.
If you want to create fear, which I think this story is keen on doing, then you place your characters inside that dangerous community. If they’re a million miles away and safe in their own home, where is the fear? It was a strange choice.
Also, the big hook here is the husbands being turned into obedient drones. But the manner in which this happens is a huge letdown. You’re thinking it’s some advanced lobotomy procedure that permanently changes them. But, instead, it’s this nebulous therapy that Cornelia uses. And it’s never clear why they’re changing. She asks them questions. She does a couple of jedi mind tricks to get them to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. But nothing ever occurred where we understood why the man had turned into a mindless drone. I guess it was up to us to make that leap.
And the conclusion to this arson investigation was lame. It didn’t have that “Holy Shit” moment where everything comes together in some shocking way. It was basically Cornelia working her vague magic over this guy and that’s why he’s dead. In other words, it was something we could’ve predicted ourselves.
Now, this all might be confusing to you because I just told you how much I liked Chandler Baker’s writing. But let me reiterate what I said. I said I like: HER WRITING. This book was going to decide whether I liked HER STORYTELLING. Completely different things (as we talked about the other day).
Her storytelling was not good. A critical component of good storytelling is THE PAYOFFS to all of the earlier SETUPS. The payoffs here were lame. It’s never clear why the men have turned into drones. The payoff to the arson storyline – which was THE PRIMARY PLOT – was so casual, dare I say it was nonexistent.
And for a movie about turning husbands into drones, we know very little about Hayden in this story. I see this happen with weaker writers often. They know their main characters intimately, but any of the characters orbiting that main character get little-to-no depth. And it’s because the writers don’t want to do the work. They know that creating a fully-rounded husband character that feels like a living breathing human being takes time. It’s easier to convince yourself that secondary characters don’t need as much depth and leave it at that.
In that sense, it strikes me as the kind of story that was written too fast and not rewritten enough. I can tell when writers didn’t give everything and that’s definitely the case here. I don’t know if there was an unrealistic deadline involved but something prevented this story from reaching its potential. I’m sad to say The Husbands wasn’t for me.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I know it’s cheap. I know it’s easy. But gosh darnit, using the “mysterious thing that happened to our hero in the past” carrot WORKS ALL THE FREAKING TIME. Especially in these novels. We keep hearing about some crippling accident that happened in this family and we have to keep reading to find out what it was.
What I learned 2: Powerful payoffs. That ‘crippling accident’ carrot I just talked about? It had a really weak payoff. It amounted to a child crawling out onto the porch because Nora fell asleep. That was the big “accident” that had 250 pages of setup. Something Chandler Baker needs to work on as a writer is her PAYOFFS. Her payoffs sucked. This accident payoff sucked. The arson payoff sucked. The ‘turning husbands into drones’ payoff sucked. You have to go bigger and flashier with all these things if you’re going to make us wait 200+ pages to get that payoff. The payoffs here were worth 20 pages at most.
