Rating:

Awful Offices

Author: Ben Farthing

Chris has lost everything, but he has gained one thing: his son. And for his son, he’s willing to fight and to face unimaginable horrors.

Chris’ aspiring career as an architect was long since destroyed by his college professor. Now his marriage is over. But his newly adopted son, Eddie, is his world. For that, he’s willing to reunite with the professor who destroyed his promising future and stole his hard work. Together with this nemesis, he will be working with a suspicious billionaire to investigate a skyscraper that has appeared overnight. Something about Chris, about his research, makes the motley team think that he can unveil the mystery behind the building’s sudden appearance and its ultimate purpose.

You see, this is not the first building of its kind. Each new building has unveiled something essential to modern civilization. Each new building is rushing all of humanity towards some sort of revelation. Chris is wooed by the mystery, but more importantly, he needs the money to make Eddie’s life better. When he realizes that his son has misunderstood the failed marriage and entered the dangerous building alone to find what he thinks is treasure, the stakes only increase. Maybe the past buildings were benevolent, but this one certainly isn’t and, of course, something lurks on floor 120, the top floor, the end of the line, the answer to the costly mystery.

Like Ben Farthing’s other quirky offerings, It Waits on the Top Floor is a blend of bizzarro horror and touching, introspective emotion. The serious theme for this book is about belonging. Eddie is a troubled child, having been raised by a drug-addicted mother who did not want him. Now, his adopted mother has also vanished, leaving him to think that the fault lies with himself. He must try harder. He must do more to earn love, to stop disappointing those around him. Eddie brings humanity to this story, making us pause in the middle of what can only be described as psychedelic weirdness to think about the horrifying shape of the foster system and the abuses enacted against innocent children. Farthing’s books often examine the joys and horrors of parenthood, specifically of failing as a parent, and this rendition once again picks the subject up, interjecting real life terrors in between creatures that lurch from walls and swallow their victims into a grey dimension of pain and torment.

Despite the more intellectual elements of the book, It Waits on the Top Floor is a little less poignant than some (such as Circus Tents, where the entire framing of the horror is a meta-narrative for a parent’s fear of failing his son). As the story continues, only Eddie maintains our sympathy. Chris is a wooden character whose actions are meant to drive the plot, quickly losing the nature of a real person in distress. The moments of introspection are there and gone quickly, and the narrative is more interested in exploring the new building and offing side characters looking to make a buck from this new supernatural skyscraper.

Image by dongyun bai from Pixabay

Now, when I first read about this book, I was intrigued by the idea of creating horror in a normal space. We’ve all been in those big, corporate buildings after hours, suddenly feeling the looming flash of fear as the fluorescents dim and go out in banks. What could be waiting around the corner? Perhaps a serial killer lurks in that last bathroom stall, his breath hidden by the loan dripping of that one sink? Or perhaps a Pinky Demon, lolling tongue of rolling fire, will rush out of a long side corridor in true Ultimate Doom ’95 fashion (yes, I’m showing my age). When the lights go out, who knows how the fabric of reality, possible and impossible, will shift?

But It Waits on the Top Floor fails to take full advantage of the inherent creepiness of modern office building design. Instead, it stays very distant, very conceptual, very intangible. There are floors of desks and offices, but nothing interesting in them. Instead of the late-night creeps, they have more of the sense of the mid-morning mundane. A stuffy, bored-at-work on the weekend feel. The few areas of kaleidoscopic colors morphing in an Austin Powers display across cubes is meant to invoke a cyclopean weirdness, but instead it just feels unreal: trying too hard, becoming too ephemeral to tingle our imaginations. This is 120 floors of nothing very much, and nothing very horrifying. Even the basement only offers a shadow creature; the lurchers that come out of the walls are a nice touch, but they can’t carry the narrative themselves. Instead, we’re all left remembering just how boring the office can be on a slow day.

The ending does add a bit more, and sort of gives a plausible explanation, alongside a campy human villain with, admittedly, a pretty creative demise. It’s not bad, but it’s not Farthing’s wackiest or most horrifying. It’s ok, but repetitive, with our characters lacking logic at almost every step. Just “ehhh.” I’ll read the next book, because I’m on a Farthing kick, but this one didn’t send me like some of his other works.

– Frances Carden

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Other Books by Ben Farthing

I Found Puppets Living in my Apartment Walls

I Found a Circus Tent in the Woods Behind My House

I Found Christmas Lights Slithering Up My Street

Frances Carden
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