Ambrose Ibsen's Wretchedness

Wretchedness by Ambrose Ibsen seemed promising: a mysterious artifact, an ancient god, a secret cult, and a worldwide menace. This had everything to be great story, and it was painful to see Ibsen completely waste it. Warning: this review contains SPOILERS.

First, a short description. The book starts with Solomon being called by one of his tenants, Renee, to deal with a nonexistent intruder, after which he begins to have disturbing hallucinations and the feeling that something has burrowed its way into his mind. Renee herself has changed, and when she’s sent to a nursing home, Audrey, her nurse, begins to experience the same terrifying symptoms as Solomon. Elsewhere, Professor Hagon is handed over a mysterious tablet covered in symbols no one can read by Ted Cotler, a man claiming to be a former student. Overtaken by a fear he can’t explain, Hagon decides that the only way to cure it is by deciphering the tablet, inadvertently paving the way to the return of a dead god that will lead Humankind to its doom…

The book has over 200 pages and 19 chapters, but felt 3 times as long. Somehow it managed to have a slower pacing than Midnight Mass. Dozens of pages go by without anything happening, as Ibsen stretched the story to its limits and beyond, filling several paragraphs with unnecessarily detailed descriptions of the characters’ movements. The craziest part is that there should’ve been enough material to fill those pages + chapters, but Ibsen just couldn’t come up with it. Because it wasn’t just the descriptions - this was incredibly repetitive. You could argue that since Hagon, Solomon, and Audrey were experiencing the same effects, of course their individual chapters will look alike. However, the repetitiveness went well beyond that. I lost count of all the times Solomon felt something getting in his head. Yes, we heard you the first time, and now what? On top of that, for all the talk about the tablet’s influence causing a fundamental, irreversible change to everyone who comes into contact with it/Renee, that change ended up being very superficial. Hagon described the Wretchedness as 'the will of this eons-dead sect and its malevolent deity', so you’d expect some deeper changes and even some mind control, which only happens twice, when Hagon writes the symbols in the library without realizing it and when Solomon’s wife tells him he’d been talking to himself. Maybe Audrey was mind controlled into helping Renee leave the nursing home, but we’ll never know because Ibsen didn’t bother writing it. Seriously, this is a debauched cult of prehistoric math enthusiasts! Was the Renee hallucinations and the aversion to Romanesco the only things Ibsen could come up with? He could’ve shaken things up by having one of the characters react differently and become fascinated with patterns and spirals, but instead they all have the same reactions, which makes it even more repetitive. That and the glacial pacing didn’t increase the suspense or create a sense of dread - they killed both until reading became a chore. Whatever horror there was disappeared after the first few chapters. The idea that the tablet was bringing back the cult as well, which was present in the other voices Solomon heard coming from Renee’s apartment after he left and the figures Hagon saw along the road when he was driving around with the tablet, was pretty much abandoned. All the talk about spirals and patterns and the ridiculous mentions of Romanesco broccoli were neither intriguing nor unsettling, and the sequence inside Renee’s lair with the stench, rotting bodies, and blood smears was gross rather than scary.

The lore associated with the tablet was unoriginal and confusing. So, there was the typical ancient evil cult plus respective deity, which had been mentioned throughout history, including in the famous Malleus Maleficarum. The tablet can influence people around it, looking for whoever is better equipped to help it resurrect their god. The tablet’s effects include extreme fear, hallucinations, and visual distortions. Later, we find out that Renee was chosen as the vessel to gestate the god and that she has the same effect on those around her. To nourish the creature growing inside her, she must kill and eat people. This alone would’ve been fine, but Ibsen then kept adding stuff while at the same time leaving some key elements unexplained. So, this cult was called both The Brotherhood of the Snake (cool) and The Fraternity of the Divine Section (decidedly not cool) and was a group of primitive mathematicians who believed their god represented structural purity and this should explain why Solomon gets freaked out by Romanesco broccoli and spirals, and why he dreams of the god inside a clock which should link with the tablet having made the clock in Hagon’s office temporarily stop, and why the tablet and its vessel drive everyone crazy and depressed? At one point Hagon told Solomon that they were fighting a theoretical concept, but that never came into play anywhere in the narrative. He also said the god’s return would throw the world into chaos with the spread of the Wretchedness as if it and the cult were super powerful and unstoppable, but that same god died and its cult went extinct before civilization. How did that even happen and why did neither Hagon or Solomon wonder about that? I also had a hard time believing that this cult did orgies and sacrifices. Okay, maybe sacrifices, but the effects of the Wretchedness made them seem too depressing for orgies. The whole 'inversion of the usual immaculate conception story' was fine, but the idea of needing an older woman as opposed to a younger woman sounded dumb. Wasn’t the cult a little too ancient for that? And why no backstory for the ossuary where the tablet was found? It sounded as if the later iterations of the cult didn’t have access to the tablet, so was that the original cult’s burial ground? Again, how the hell did they all die and lost their instruction manual for resurrecting this structural purity? As for the god itself, it seemed to enjoy hurting people, but there wasn’t much more to it. Also, while the cult was said to worship the 'great serpent' and Renee was described as reptilian with a long neck, both Hagon and Solomon saw the entity with arms and hair. That’s not a snake - that’s a hairy lizard. I’m guessing the spirals are the serpent’s coils? But then Solomon started seeing all the way to the smallest particles, which didn’t fit. And why would the eclipse, which Hagon said was used as 'an excuse for their revelry' by the cult, make the god’s vessel mortal? Worse, after Hagon classified the cult’s survival as 'unthinkable', the cult turned to… really be extinct. That was not the expectation Ibsen should’ve subverted.

It was obvious Ibsen was trying to copy Lovecraft, though in a slightly less archaic-sounding way, but it simply did not work. Hell, not even Robert Bloch and Clark Ashton Smith managed to do it when they tried to write closer to his style. This took me out of the story and when I read 'myth-shadowed god', I actually felt embarrassed. There was nothing of Lovecraft’s original and lasting world-building here - the lore of Wretchedness was a lame pastiche that never came together to form a coherent whole. When I tweeted my thoughts while reading, I compared this with The Call of Cthulhu, and I think that’s a good way to see where Ibsen went wrong in terms of structure. Yes, Lovecraft’s story features several different stories told by different characters. However, there’s a central narrator bringing them all together which makes it look less scattered. Also, each story is told in its entirety and represents a piece of a larger puzzle that actually fits together (even if Cthulhu being sploshed by a motor boat was underwhelming). Of course, even more important, they’re good stories and despite his wordiness, Lovecraft didn’t stretch it for over 2 hundred pages…

The characters could’ve helped - after all, many times they’re the ones that keep people reading. Unfortunately, for some inexplicable reason, Ibsen decided to make personality-free Solomon the main POV, followed by Hagon, and lastly Audrey, who could’ve given readers a closer look into Renee’s transformation and the entity inside her but instead only got a couple of chapters before being unceremoniously killed off-page. Seriously, that was one of the most baffling decisions in the entire book (with the repeated mentions of Romanesco a close second). Given how desperate Ibsen clearly was to drag the story, it made no sense to get rid of her like that. A good death scene would’ve been a lot better than reading about how Solomon was feeling something in his mind for the umpteenth time. Solomon’s wife Nora was a non entity who, like Audrey, was killed off-page by Renee. As for Renee herself, apart from her initial interactions with Solomon and Audrey, she appeared mostly as Solomon’s hallucination and a silent, bloody, deformed threat. And these were the only people readers got to spend time with. Even though this was a story involving a worldwide threat, Ibsen never expanded the narrative. It all felt too small, too insular. At first, I thought the news of violence and people buying guns were connected to the tablet, but neither Hagon nor Solomon mentioned it. Was it supposed to be a sort of Chekhov’s Gun for the ending? Because it just didn’t work. All this resulted in a very slight narrative.

And before the verdict, here are some more miscellaneous issues. After knowing what was going on, the events of the first chapter don’t make much sense. Renee had to have been possessed already, so who/what was coming downstairs? And why did Solomon see the god outside his door instead of Renee like he would throughout the rest of the book? Hagon’s first chapters not taking place at the same time as Solomon’s and Audrey’s was pretty obvious. Someone had to have read the tablet for something to happen. The excuse for not taking Hagon to the hospital was pretty funny. So, Solomon realized that there’d be questions and he couldn’t possibly tell people they had been exploring an old house looking for the woman they were planning to kill. Hmm, how about leaving out that last part? Even funnier was Hagon being able to stand much less walk around and even run after suffering an injury that involved his insides falling out of a hole on his side patched by someone with zero medical knowledge. Was there any reason Solomon couldn’t have gone back for Renee on his own? After all, he had nothing to lose. The John Doe segment in Chapter 5 added nothing and could’ve easily been removed - just have the cop show up at Hagon’s place with the tablet and explain how they found it and him. With everything that came before, the ending barely registered. The only thing that stood out was that stupid final line. What the hell did Romanesco ever do to Ibsen?

I decided to avoid books by A. M. Shine after a single read (The Creeper, which I reviewed here), but Ambrose Ibsen got me to read 2 of his books before calling it quits. The other one was The Lonesome Dead, which also had many of the issues plaguing Wretchedness: repetitiveness, glacial pacing, and character neglect. However, the isolated setting, the first person narration, and simpler story made it less noticeable. Yes, the family secret was convoluted, but it was an answer to the unsettling events that Douglas had been experiencing even if it left me wondering why his sister was ignored. Interestingly, it wasn’t particularly scary either, though it had a dreamlike quality that made it look more like a gentle waking nightmare at times. Judging by the copyright, Wretchedness may have been Ibsen’s first book (or at least the first one he registered), but it’s just too bad. I know how hard it is to be objective when evaluating one’s own work, but how the hell could anyone have thought this was not only fit for publication, but that you could also ask money for it? I was planning on checking Ibsen’s series featuring an occult detective, but after this, no way.

VERDICT

Wretchedness is overlong, repetitive, slow, and not scary. The thinly-sketched characters are painfully uninteresting, and the mythology boring and confusing. This was a complete waste of time, and if I hadn't started reviewing it on social media, I wouldn't have bothered to finish it. If you’re looking for a good horror story, you should look elsewhere.

By Danforth