Book Review: Spare Room

Dreda Say Mitchell's Spare Room follows Lisa, a well-off software engineer in her mid-twenties, looking for a spare room to rent in London. Staring at a past that eludes her, Lisa can't believe her luck when she lands a beautiful space for herself in the house of Martha and Jack. But just as moves in, she runs into a series of disconcerting things, including, among others, a suicide note, seemingly from the room's previous occupier, making her suspicious of Jack, who at one point even enters her room with an intent to rape her. Now you may wonder who the hell wants to stay in a house after an incident like that. Apparently Lisa, because the more the landlord couple deny the man's existence, the more determined she becomes, fixated on finding out more about him even as it threatens to make her question everything that happens around her.

Mitchell's new psychological thriller is adequately engrossing, albeit if you can buy into the central conceit, yet the real circumstances surrounding her past isn't so much a mystery as something that could have been satisfactorily resolved with a heart-to-heart conversation. The dubious motivation of withholding crucial information does nothing to the protagonist (it in fact sends Lisa into a suicidal depression, conveniently turning her an unreliable character) other than manufacture suspense from a narrative standpoint, with little to no understanding of why you should care about Lisa in the first place. At the same time, it's becoming evident that most authors don't know how to write women. Either they are crazy, or drunk, or possessive or submissive or completely unlikeable, compounded by the fact that Lisa here was all of it and came across as entitled and irascible for no reason, making her the archetypal female protagonist that litter this sub-genre.