Book Review: "Come With Me" by Ronald Malfi (2021)
Come With Me Book Review
Written by Stuart D. Monroe
Released by Titan Books
Written by Ronald Malfi
2021, 387 pages, Fiction
Released on July 20th, 2021
Review:
There’s an old joke I heard in a (mostly forgotten) film called Hollywood Knights that goes like this: “What do you get when you cross and donkey with an onion? A piece of ass that brings tears to your eyes!” It made me chuckle at seven years old, and it makes me chuckle now. That humorous onion analogy kept popping into my head as I was reading my first Ronald Malfi novel, Come With Me. Why? Because Come With Me is what you get when you cross an onion, an intimate haunting, all-too-common American tragedy, and enough grief to ignite a mass suicide.
I know that’s not a punchline, per se, but bear with me here.
Aaron Decker is a haunted man. He lost his wife and soulmate, Allison, in an active shooter situation. Her ghost and her absence are breaking him from the inside out, and that’s before he discovers a receipt from a motel room in another part of the country. They had no secrets, or so he thought…so why was she hundreds of miles away in a cheap motel while he was none the wiser? Curiosity butchers the cat as Aaron begins to dig deeper into Allison’s secrets. He travels the country unraveling a mystery that laid beside him for years without his knowledge. Now he’s haunted not only by her ghost and her absence but also by all the things he doesn’t know about his dead wife. He’s going to find out, though. Aaron Decker is going to risk his life in a journey that will teach him what it truly means to be both haunted and hunted.
In my circle of literary compatriots, I’ve caught some light grief for not having read Ronald Malfi. And I get it now. I really do. This is my first Malfi novel; it absolutely will not be my last. Malfi’s wordplay is subtle enough to avoid being ostentatious. Instead, it’s straightforward sublimeness catches you off guard and you find yourself grinning (describing Allison’s beret as scarlet because you don’t need to say raspberry beret). Part of a great story is leaving you with a crisp, defined image, and a sentence like “I saw a tabby bullet along the upstairs hall, zoetrope-like behind the staves of the banister as we climbed the stairs…” does a bang-up job of that.
Come With Me is that proverbial onion, with layers of different stages of grief coexisting with varying levels of supernatural occurrences wrapped a murder mystery core that drives as hard and fast as anything you’ll ever read. Then there’s the social context of gun violence in America, and Malfi does a deft job of illustrating the human damage toll that’s become too damn common today. As the old expression goes, “It’s a lot to unpack.”
That unpacking never feels like a chore. I have not enjoyed the finish of a novel this much since Lisey’s Story. Ronald Malfi understands that when you truly love someone…when your souls are anchored to each other’s…it’s also a haunting of terrifying power. I’m a sucker for being scared and anxious while having my heart broken; all the extra blood really enriches the experience. Also, like the best work of Stephen King, the last few pages wrap it up with a bow that will cause you to need a minute to get it together. When Aaron’s story circles back around to Rita and the lie he tells her, I challenge you…no, I fucking dare you…to keep it together. Malfi wields a damn scalpel when he writes.
Come With Me combines the depth and characterization of Stephen King with the mounting horror of Ramsey Campbell (oh dear God, that Gas Head statuary will never leave my brain) and action pacing that feels like the best of Joe R. Lansdale, His Ownself. It’s a book that begs for a film adaptation and should damn sure get one. It dives deeper than you’ll be comfortable going into the nature of what it is to be haunted, hitting you with the truth that when you lose someone you’ll spend as much time with their obsessions as you will their ghost.
Grade:
5.0 out of 5.0 stars
