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Reviewed by Viga Boland for Readers' Favorite
As Emma’s best friend, Maya, passed away from leukemia, the last thing Maya saw wasn’t the usual bright, white light one often hears about that is associated with the death experience, but the bright red and green lights we associate with Christmas. Yet there was something sinister about those red and green lights. It took until I was well into this story to recognize what Maya saw, and it was, well, horrific! Given that Christmas, its lights, ornaments, beautifully decorated trees, reindeer, elves, Santa, and even Mrs. Claus are central to this novel, I never expected Tom Barnes would end up facing a murder charge and that his wife would end up afraid for herself and Emma at the hands of her husband. Everything is Temporary by Jon Cohn could have been titled “A Christmas Nightmare.”
It’s been several years since I’ve watched a horror movie…the daily TV news is often frightening enough for me. As for horror novels, well, there’s always comfort in the fact that they are fiction. But it was the title Everything is Temporary that grabbed my attention. Eager to find out, I plunged into the lives of the Barnes family and was relieved to find that what Tom, Sarah, and their 13-year-old daughter, Emma experienced was indeed temporary. Or was it? Ah, the endless questions that haunt horror fans after they close the book! Jon Cohn has taken an innovative approach to exploring the idea that everything is temporary: the story is narrated by weaving the past into and out of the present, thereby reminding readers that traumatic events in our pasts forever impact our present and our futures. Everything may indeed be temporary, but our past, once temporary, is after all, permanent. While I was more caught up in the psychology of the characters like Tom, true horror fans will get more than their share of ugly reptilian creatures to feed upon if this is their idea of Christmas reading. Just make sure you have a comfortable chair by a warm fireplace because Everything is Temporary is indeed chilling.
