by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin (Germany, Pantheon)

The premise of You Should Have Left is a familiar one, not all that different from The Shining: a writer and his family take vacation in an unsettling house in a secluded mountain locale, mainly in an effort to give a writer’s-block afflicted writer a chance to finally begin work again. Kehlmann defies any expectation of the familiar becoming boring in this short 107-page thriller. In Benjamin’s translation the prose reads quickly, yet the pacing of the tension is slow, absorbing, but becomes perfectly frantic. It details a writer’s mental unraveling, or the unraveling of reality in this house. We learn that he may not be the only person to lose his mind here, that this may be an ancient location of terror. Reflections in glass don’t show what should be there, the house may not be a place he can leave, his wife may be cheating on him. Any of it may be real; all of it may be in his head. It is terrorizing for him, and he passes that terror to his family. It’s dark and strange, reminiscent of the hit Netflix show, also German, Dark, with touches of Philip K. Dick, Lovecraft, and straight thrillers. Kehlmann masterfully builds a world and there is an unsettlingly self-aware main character. Natural, smooth prose is also disrupted by odd word choices and structure, an effective move by Kehlmann, captured by Benjamin, to add to the unsettled feel reading it. This makes for a bold statement and illustrates the madness of the novel, and the paradoxes of the storyline. As strange as a house which physically and metaphorically eats away at the inhabitant is, it all comes together and I couldn’t leave, was forced, like the family, to see how it all unpleasantly and terrifyingly collides together.

When was the last time a book really scared you?

Every October, my partner lines up a slate of scary movies for us to watch in preparation for Halloween. I am not a fan of horror—I enjoy the ritual of these yearly forays into fright cinema, but I don’t really like the movies that much. Most of them really aren’t scary: once established, the conceits rapidly grow stale, and the movies become a tedious process of getting to the inevitable conclusion. The ones that do work tend to be more upsetting than frightening—The Neighbors scared the shit out of me, but it wasn’t really a pleasurable fear; more like a mild trauma, which has left me with a flicker of nervousness every time the doorbell rings at night. There are exceptions—this last year, for instance, I loved The Babadook, which coupled suspense and startling gotcha! scenes with an underlying existential brooding over the terrors of maternal ambivalence and stress. But overall, I am just not that into horror flicks.

Thanks to BTBA, however, I have dipped my toes into the water of terrifying fiction, and it turns out that I love it. Fiction produces all kinds of emotions, but usually they are more of a slow burn—these books send your adrenaline soaring. You read with breath quickened and muscles tensed. Yet, neither of the two books that I want to tell you about feels gratuitous, or sensationalistic. They’re pure rush, but they earn their effects honestly.

Daniel Kehlmann’s You Should Have Left is a taut, thrilling little terror, part Shining, part House of Leaves. A man goes to the country with his wife and daughter to write, and strange things start happening. The language is straightforward, and the pacing is perfect. The story is creepy, but not upsetting—a purely pleasurable fear. It’s a novel you can burn through in one breathless sitting (it probably takes about the same amount of time as it would take to watch your average horror film!), best enjoyed in a quiet corner of the house on a dark evening or cloudy afternoon.

Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, by contrast, is a deeply disturbing tale. The terrors it holds have the tinge of coercion: it’s a book you read with your heart in your throat, pushing on through its looser pacing, though you hardly dare to hope for a cheery resolution. The story is opaque: a woman and boy chat in a hospital, the boy pressing the woman to tell her story, seeking answers to his own mysterious condition. As the details are gradually revealed, a terrifying picture emerges through the haze, with the reader sharing the woman’s growing sense of panic. Although it is theoretically possible to read it in one sitting, I could not—I simply had to take a break. In contrast to Kehlmann’s delicious creepiness, Schweblin offers an anxious, gut-wrenching tale. It is just this side of pleasurable—in the midst of your queasiness you find yourself thinking—oh man, this is goooood—and it definitely leaves a mark that will linger long after reading.

If you tend, like me, toward the more intellectual, contemplative reads, check these two out, and remind yourself of fiction’s more visceral powers.

Meta-fiction gets fair play in much of the stories; Kehlmann refers to himself as the author who can change her destiny towards the end of his most powerful story, “Rosalie Goes Off to Die.” There’s also “A Contribution to the Debate,” in which a computer geek runs into a famous author, Leo Richter, and attempts to find a way into his stories:

I had to talk to him. That was it: talk to him, admit everything exactly the way it happened, the way I’ve just told you now. Didn’t matter what he did next, he wouldn’t be able to resist it, because it was the real story. My entry into fiction. Right now, at breakfast.

The geek is infatuated with Lara Gaspard, a character in Richter’s novels. In this same story, Kehlmann employs a techno-chat room style of prose with truncated sentences and abbreviated thoughts. And even though through most of the story this style enhances the pathos of the narrator, there are times when it becomes lazy writing:

Then both of us silent for a time. He smoked, I smoked and the rain did its raining thing.

On the surface, this is an entertaining collection of Kehlmann’s inventive takes on modern culture: because of a cell phone number mix-up, man is thought to be somebody else, an actor takes to impersonating himself at night only to have his identity stolen by another impersonator of him, a writer takes the place of another writer at a conference and she is lead into a spiraling descent. The writer—Leo Richter—and the actor—Ralf Tanner—show up in some form in many of the stories. But the interlinking people and objects in these stories becomes predictable and leave the reader a bit bored, like listening to a comic pound a joke into the ground. He wrings the concept of identity in the modern world to the last drop.

What is frustrating is that Kehlmann invents a concept and instead of delving into the characters, it feels as if he just stuck a plot and some semi-developed characters around it. So, yes, these stories are creative, but are they worthwhile? Perhaps if he weren’t so seemingly impressed with his own ability to mock the world in which we live, mock his own participation and mock the reader, it would feel less of a one-noter and more like a nuanced orchestral piece.

Carol Brown Janeway, who also translated Measuring the World, does an adequate job with the translation. There are times when prose feels outdated or uneven, but it is not enough to distract the reader. To her credit, translating a story written in the style of a chatroom is a challenge and she impresses with her skill.

Fame is a book of episodic stories for the moment and for our ever-present social networking culture; however, one wishes that Kehlmann might have taken advantage of this opportunity to create stories that last longer than a simple episode. With our increasing dependence on modern technology, Kehlmann delivers a status update to be read, laughed about, and then forgotten.

Monica Carter is a regular contributor to Three Percent, and a member of the Best Translated Book Award fiction panel. She lives in Los Angeles and runs

I really want to thank Monica for writing this and articulating part of the reason why I’m not a big Kehlmann fan. Not to give away too much of the review—you really should read it—but this paragraph is perfect:

What is frustrating is that Kehlmann invents a concept and instead of delving into the characters, it feels as if he just stuck a plot and some semi-developed characters around it. So, yes, these stories are creative, but are they worthwhile? Perhaps if he weren’t so seemingly impressed with his own ability to mock the world in which we live, mock his own participation and mock the reader, it would feel less of a one-noter and more like a nuanced orchestral piece.

Click here to read the entire piece. (Which isn’t as negative as it may seem from that example.)

I can’t read the article in the original (which can be found ), but Michael’s summary makes it seem like Kehlmann’s shooting off in fairly uninformed manner. (Which is sort of what I’ve come to expect after seeing him at the PEN World Voices Festival last year.)

Apparently he first complains that if a book isn’t on the GBP longlist, it has little chance of being reviewed. Which smacks of bullshit and a bit of a personal grudge perhaps?

But this is the best (in Michael’s translation):

And one knows — I went through it myself — that nominated authors are unofficially informed that staying away from the ceremony would lead to an automatic disqualification. Even if a book is an epochal success, if its author is not willing to swallow some sedative and physically take part in the competition, he won’t receive the prize, a decisive distinction from the National Book Award or the Booker Prize, that as a matter of course regularly are handed out to absent authors.

Er, uh, not. In fact, as Michael points out, it’s right in the that not only does the author have to attend the ceremony, but he/she “must agree to participate in the Foundation’s Website-related publicity, including on-line “chats” with readers across the country.” And the promotion synergy doesn’t stop there. Also according to guidelines, publishers of the finalists have to pay $1,000 to support promotional activities, pay for their author to attend the ceremony, and purchase medallions from the National Book Foundation to affix to finalists and winning titles.

I hate to suggest that such cooperation helps increase the reach and attention of the National Book Award and may be one of the reasons that so much attention is paid to the winner . . .

I also have to say that Kehlmann’s suggestion of abolishing the longlist is silly from the point of view of a foreign publisher. The German Book Office and others do a fantastic job of getting the word out about new German titles, but nevertheless, a number of books slide right by. This longlist (and Michael’s suggestion of making the list of 160+ nominees available) provides publishers like Open Letter with another source of information. Another list of potentially great titles. Instead of eliminating the longlist, I wish someone would provide sample translations of these books. . .