Book Review: The Handyman Method by Nick Cutter and Andrew F. Sullivan

After Trent Saban is laid off from his job, he and his family decide to move to a new home, the first – and thus cheapest – one built in the Dunsany Estates subdivision. Trent, his wife Rita and their son Milo are unimpressed by the dusty exterior, but the house itself proves to be gorgeous on the inside. Trent is pleased that he’s been able to secure such a good deal for his family, at least until he discovers a large crack in the wall of the master bedroom’s walk-in closet.

Never mind, he thinks, he can fix it himself easily enough without having to get the (annoying) subdivision developers involved. As any novice looking to make simple repairs does in the 21st century, he goes looking on YouTube for instructions and advice, and comes across Handyman Hank’s channel. At first, it’s all innocuous stuff about home repair, delivered by an affable host in a manner that Trent finds reassuring, if not downright soothing. But as more structural flaws begin to show in the Sabans’ home, Trent begins to grow more and more absorbed in, and influenced by, the videos:

Anyway, the more Trent investigated Hank’s channel–which he did a dozen or more times a day–the more he saw that Hank was presenting a how-to guide on manliness. A certain kind of man, who did things the Old-Fashioned Way.

 

“Most men never use a straight razor,” Hank said presently. “Hell, they’d probably slit their stupid throats.”

 

Milo was asleep, the house quiet aside from an inconstant gurgle coming through the vents. Trent was in the bathroom, his face foamed up in the mirror. His razor was from the Beard Club: $18.99 via mail-direct, including a handsome faux-leather case. The case had a loop to hang it off a belt, but really, what kind of maniac walked around with a straight razor on his belt?

What kind of maniac, indeed. Soon, Trent’s obsession with fixing up the house is extended to “fixing” his life, under Hank’s toxic tutelage. Rita seems too absorbed with work to pay more than a passing attention to Trent’s growing psychosis. It’s Milo who not only discovers strange and awful things in the forest around the house, but who takes the brunt of his father’s growing emotional distance and general dissatisfaction with life. It isn’t just that he can’t tell his father about the bad things he’s been seeing. He can’t even tell him about the good things, topics they’d once discussed freely and pleasantly before the move:

[B]ut if Milo told his dad any of that, he’d get The Look.

 

The Look was Dad’s new way of saying Milo had done something weird without putting it into words. Milo hadn’t understood what The Look meant at first, but once he made the connection it made him feel all shrivelly inside, like a Styrofoam cup tossed in a fire. Now Milo dreaded The Look, and missed being able to tell his father the things that really mattered to him.

Milo’s loneliness causes him to turn to YouTube as well, as he builds impossible contraptions under the hypnotic influence of a seemingly harmless kid’s presenter. With the men in her family falling under a seductive spell, will Rita be able to wake up to what’s going on and save them all from certain doom?

I don’t think I’ve ever read another horror novel where the chosen one hero basically says “to hell with this” and does the right thing regardless of the devastating consequences, at least not in the same way depicted in The Handyman Method. Nick Cutter and Andrew F. Sullivan convincingly dismantle an outdated notion of duty in a book that combines brutal satire with page-turning suspense. I was deeply impressed by the panache with which the authors pursued that narrative choice, on top of their also excellent interrogations of toxic masculinity, generational trauma, and the harmful expressions of private shame. This is not a book for the faint of heart or weak of stomach, but it is a hilarious, smart, and surprisingly thoughtful horror novel about what it means to be a modern family.