The Fall of the House of Tatterly, mglit that almost nails it

I saw a football game the other day that reminded me of The Fall of the House of Tatterly, but more about that in a moment. The Fall of the House of Tatterly is an mglit book about ghosts, mediums, exorcisms, family tradition, teen angst and the low country in South Carolina. That’s a place that we vacation yearly and this book jams the aesthetics to that area so well you’ll be checking the spine of the book for Spanish Moss. As a book, it does so many things right that it’s reminiscent of a football game where most of it is so one-sided, with such a dominant level of play that it’s unbelievable how far it fell when the final page is turned.

It’s not that The Fall of the House of Tatterly is a bad book, it’s the opposite. Theo is a twelve-year-old boy who can see ghosts. His cousin, Issa, can channel spirits where they’re able to possess her. The ghosts don’t form an orderly queue with Theo, and that proves to be very frustrating for him. They’ll appear anytime during the day in various states of decay and levels of sanity. Theo is used to this because his family has had abilities like this for generations. He’s learning how to best use them, but with normal teen life and his family’s constant harassment of real estate people trying to buy their classic house, it’s frustrating.

Theo is encountered by all manner of spooks, but one especially gnarly hag leaves him speechless. It’s a hag who is amped up much more so than usual spirits and is intent on harming him and Issa. His grandmother realizes that he needs a reading, so she sends the two of them off to a market where folks with special abilities gather. He’s told that he’s a conduit for saving the Earth or ending it, which kind of freaks him out, but he’s also given a snake to help protect him.

The person giving him his reading lets him know that his father, whom he’s never known, might have something to do with all of this. There are also some details thrown in about how the family trees of black people were changed due to slavery. The two leave the reading suspecting that things are about to get worse for them and their family.

Sure enough, when they get back home Theo and his new friend have a falling out, some real estate developers have a meeting with his grandmother and a pair of devil dogs appear in tandem with the big bad. The Paddy Roller is the big bad, a former slave chaser who is now a demon and has been chasing the last in the Tatterly lineage, Theo for a hundred years. When Paddy Roller catches up to Theo it’s obvious that he could crush him in any manner of combat, so he challenges the demon and his crew to a game of basketball.

It’s important to point out that the first 85% of The Fall of the House of Tatterly crackles with a genuine sense of evil and spectral goo. When the demons appear, you can all but touch the ooze leaking from their disfigurements. Theo and Issa go to the black market for their reading it’s an adventure that you want to book with them. The historic angles of their family’s DNA being altered due to slavery adds a fascinating twist.

The racist ghost is where I started to roll my eyes. Roller was using terms like “you people” and intent on getting the family out of their ancestral home, before being tricked by Theo to risk it all on a game of pickup basketball. The Fall of the House of Tatterly went from a genuinely entertaining ghost mglit that anyone could love to a romp that echoes the needless racism of The Wild, Wild West.

So, is a book that’s 85% great still good? I’m reminded of the Detroit Lions and San Francisco Forty-Niners game. I was pulling for the Lions, so the first half was great, but the second half was better for Forty-Niner fans, so was it a good game? It, like The Fall of the House of Tatterly, was ultimately frustrating and one just wishes that it had balanced itself out or gone in a different direction. Mglit readers might embrace the cultural representation and randomness of the book’s final act. Some readers might see the book as trying to exploit one topic and then embracing tropes as an exit strategy.

So, is a book that’s 85% great still worth reading? For those mglit audiences that like ghosts with a finale of basketball and allusions of social commentary, yes. For the masses, Tatterly does build a world and author Shanna Miles creates some great ghosts with detailed scares, but any future tales would benefit from less silliness and a stronger heel.

The Fall of the House of Tatterly is by Shanna Miles and is available on Union Square Kids.

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