A while back, I reviewed a 2014 novel called Suffer the Children by Craig DiLouie, which I thought was phenomenal. So when his 2023 book Episode Thirteen popped up in my Kindle Unlimited recommendations, I thought I’d have a gander at it, as the cover and one-sentence synopsis looked interesting.
Episode Thirteen has been called a “found-footage” novel; in other words, it’s presented in an epistolary style, modeled after one of those found-footage movies centered around a paranormal investigation team, such as Grave Encounters or maybe Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, but in written form. The narrative is laid out as a series of emails, text messages, journal entries, and descriptions of video footage found in the house after the incidents of the novel.
This format is largely successful, in my opinion, and serves the story quite well, keeping things moving along at a good clip and ensuring that we get to spend an equal amount of time with all the characters, getting a feel for their personalities and thoughts as the events unfold.
While the ending goes pretty far out there into almost transcendentalist or cosmic horror territory, I admit I kinda dug that because I wasn’t expecting the book to end the way it did, and I always have mad respect for an author willing to take a tried and true genre story like this and go somewhere a bit different with it. I noticed that a few reviewers complained that the ending strayed into science fiction, though (which I don’t consider completely accurate; I might call it speculative fiction, vaguely along the lines of House of Leaves), so maybe know that going in so you at least have an idea of it going a bit cross-genre and aren’t completely blindsided. And as with most of my reviews, I’m not going to spoil the whole book, but I am going to discuss a few plot points that you may not want to know before diving in, so consider this your one and only spoiler warning.
So here’s the setup: a gang of paranormal investigators have a fairly successful TV show called Fade to Black, which is nearing the end of its first season and is still in limbo as to whether it will be renewed. The team consists of the main investigator Matt, who frequently communicated with the spirit of a little girl named Tammy as a child and has been trying to prove the existence of ghosts ever since; his wife and co-host Claire, a physics genius and skeptic who monitors all the team’s ghost hunting equipment and acts as the show’s resident debunker; a former cop and true believer named Kevin, an expert ghost hunter who is convinced he once encountered a demonic entity while on a domestic violence call; cameraman Jake, who’s friendly enough but is mostly in it for the paycheck; and Jessica, an actress hired for her looks and her engagement with the audience who doesn’t feel one way or the other about paranormal stuff, at least initially.
For their season one finale, the FTB team manages to get access to the paranormal Holy Grail: they’ll be allowed to do an investigation of Foundation House, a facility run by the Paranormal Research Foundation back in the 1970s. All the scientists conducting experiments back then mysteriously disappeared, and rumors about the weird shit they were up to were quite rampant, though no one alive seems to know all the details. It turns out that the experimenters were all very much into the Human Potential Movement, using everything in their arsenal—mind-altering drugs, meditation, hypnosis, religious mantras, and general consciousness expanding—to try to connect with the other side.
Whether they succeeded or not is still up for debate, but Foundation House has had a reputation as the Mount Everest of ghost hunting ever since, though no one has been allowed to officially document it until now. The FTB gang packs up their gear and gets ready to stay at the place for several days, hoping they’ll get enough mind-blowing footage to ensure a second season.
For the first couple of days, though, it seems like the whole trip is going to be a bust; even though Matt, Kevin, and even Jessica were excited at first because the place felt “alive” from the get-go, as time goes on, nothing of note occurs, and even the sensitive members of the team concede that the house now seems completely dead.
To make matters worse, Claire has been secretly considering leaving the show. Though she and Matt are very much in love and the show is very much their baby, she’s growing tired of being the token debunker and feels that being on a silly ghost-hunting program is holding her back from her greater scientific ambitions. She hasn’t told Matt about her decision, though, and is just waiting for the right time to break the news to him gently. It should be noted too that Matt has also not told the rest of his crew that the network is not certain they’ll be renewing the series.
As everyone is trying to deal with their disappointment over no activity taking place at this supposedly super-haunted location, a definite manifestation occurs that gets them all pumped up again: several objects seemingly move by themselves in a room that’s been sealed off, and though the cameras trained on the objects conveniently have their batteries die before the footage is captured, the whole crew sees the aftermath and knows there’s no way the movement could have been faked.
It turns out, however, that there was a way it could have been faked, but it also turns out that it doesn’t even matter, because shortly after uncovering the deception, very obviously supernatural phenomena goes absolutely apeshit all over the place. It’s so drastic and so unquestionable, in fact, that it spurs the team into running from the house in an absolute panic.
After a while, though, they get their shit together and regroup, determined to return to Foundation House to finish what they started. Particularly keen to go back is Claire, who now realizes that the paranormal is real and that she is on the cusp of making perhaps the greatest scientific discovery in human history.
After they go back, things start to get decidedly bizarre and surreal, as it appears the scientists from back in the 70s were really onto something in regards to contacting the spirit world. As a matter of fact, they stumbled upon something so staggeringly vast that the human mind can barely conceive of it. I won’t spoil what that is, but right here is where comparisons to House of Leaves start to become relevant.
I had a great time with this book; at first, I thought the epistolary format was going to get on my nerves or take me out of the story, but it was so well done and so seamlessly integrated with the narrative that I didn’t even notice it after a while. It really did start to play in my head exactly the way a found-footage movie would, and for that reason, this would likely be a really easy film adaptation to make.
While this starts out like a standard paranormal investigation story, it does go in some pretty wild directions, so if you want to stick with something more traditional, then you might not be a fan of the pathways it takes toward the end. I thought it was quite original and compelling, but I can totally understand if it’s not your thing as well.
I will note that the first part of the book is a bit of a slow burn, as we’re establishing the relationships between all the characters and nothing supernatural is really happening, but I found the characters likable and intriguing enough to hang out with for a while before the ghost shit hit the fan. While I do wish that there had been more explanation concerning the experiments from the 1970s, I also think it was probably best to leave things ambiguous.
All in all, this was a fast, fun read that got surprisingly reality-warping toward the end. I’d recommend it to fans of found-footage horror, ghost-hunting shows, and surrealist horror in the vein of Mark Z. Danielewski. I think I still slightly preferred Craig DiLouie’s other book I read, Suffer the Children, but this one was great too, just in a completely different way.
Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.
The Scare Salon 