Book Review: Man on the Ceiling

Man on the Ceiling, The (Discoveries) by Steve Rasnic Tem
Surreal to the point of near trippy-ness and yet very realistic, this fictionalized account of real events ("everything we're telling you here is true") grips the reader at a gut level. Any person who can even imagine having children will find this horrifying novel difficult to set aside. “The Man on the Ceiling” is the story of parents who having lost a child (exact reasons unknown) struggle to deal with the aftermath of emotions and delusions that flow from the sudden and horrible loss of a loved one. While, to some, the effects they use may seem overdone and overwrought, for anyone who has suffered a loss like this it will all seem oh so real. The pain from this sort of death can cause those left behind to not exactly lose touch with reality, but rather to find the “real” less tangible than desolation of their own emotional landscape… one becomes lost in an internal war zone of obvious and hidden dangers. For most people this “other” world can take a long time to (mostly) escape from, others may never even make the beginning steps to heal this tragedy. “The Man on the Ceiling” is labeled as a horror novel and it is in the sense that it attempts to capture one of life’s most horrifying events, the loss of a person one loves deeply.