I legitimately considered not writing a blog post about this book. Not because I hated it (which I did, violently), but because presenting this book as a companion to the movie Abandon is quite frankly a wild mischaracterization. Abandon has as much of a relationship to Adams Fall as Pearl Harbor (the movie) has to its historical basis, which is to say…almost none. In the same way people ridicule LaCroix sparkling water for having only the slightest hint of the flavor it purports to be, Abandon’s screenplay was probably written in the same bookstore where a copy of the book was being sold and that’s the strongest connection that exists between Point A and Point B. I would almost think it was a mistake -- that our information was incorrect and this book actually had nothing to do with the movie we watched -- except the Internet and my Kindle can confirm that this book used to be titled Adams Fall and was retitled Abandon in an attempt to solidify its connection to the movie. So, everyone at the top was on board with this farce, and I hope author Sean Desmond enjoyed his fifteen minutes of fame (I can only find two other books published under his name, so it seems like this collaboration shockingly did not catapult him to success).
So, why am I writing this post in spite of all that? Because if I don’t, I will likely never be able to get over the fact that I wasted so many precious hours of my life on this drivel. I spent roughly eight hours slogging through this novel, and not to be dramatic but I would rather die than let that sacrifice go unacknowledged.
I’m just going to start by listing the things that the movie and the book have in common.
They both take place at an old, prestigious university full of rich snobs.
The main character is insane.
Some people die.
That’s it. Those are the threads tying these stories together. The similarities end there.
Adams Fall is written as a first-person narrative, and our narrator is never actually identified by name. We determine he is male from context clues but not much context is needed to figure out that he is a miraculously pretentious douchebag. It is revealed very early on that our narrator has a girlfriend named Rosie. Rosie used to date his roommate, Billy, but while they were together, our narrator and Rosie were having an affair. Billy ended up committing suicide and though we never receive confirmation of this, our narrator is convinced that Billy killed himself after discovering the betrayal. All of this occurred two years prior to current events, and if it wasn’t enough to turn you against our narrator, he spends the better part of this novel chasing another classmate named Maeve and ends up cheating on Rosie with her. The dude sucks. And since we have to receive the entire narrative through him, I think you can appreciate why it was such a painful reading experience.
In addition to this love triangle of his own making, our narrator is struggling to complete his senior thesis, similar to Katie in the movie. However, he is an English student, not finance, and given what we see through this novel, it’s a straight miracle that he has managed to progress so far in higher education. This book does not describe a gentle unraveling of one young man’s sanity -- it gets obliterated early on and never recovers. He begins seeing another young man lurking around corners and on foggy rooftops and starts to believe he is being followed. He eventually catches up with him one night and has an unsettling conversation that very logically leads him to the completely illogical conclusion that this person is an apparition, a ghost a la Hamlet. One might expect a person to maybe initially resist a conclusion like that. They might wonder if they’re crazy or if there is some other scientific explanation, especially since our narrator is frequently intoxicated by drugs and/or alcohol which could explain such a hallucination. But our narrator never once considers these options and almost eagerly assumes the burden of being haunted. If I were to take a stab at the metaphors of this novel, I might posit that this ghost was a manifestation of his guilt regarding what he did to Billy and to Rosie and on some level he felt he deserved to be haunted and punished for the things he’d done. But given how things play out, I’m not sure that’s the correct read.
From this point on, it is incredibly difficult to suss out what is real and what is a hallucination. I’ll take some of the blame because I definitely started skimming through the middle of the novel but you could not pay me enough to read every word of this thing and I do this blog for free. But the blur between fact and fantasy is so profound that when Maeve is suddenly and violently incinerated in a heating vent in the underground tunnels beneath the college campus, I genuinely thought it was our narrator’s hallucination until several chapters later when the police start investigating her disappearance. In my defense, the narrator and Maeve had been both drunk and blitzed out of their minds on mushrooms during that sequence and also I’m pretty sure that’s not quite how Maeve died based on the end of the novel but the bottom line is that Maeve did die that night and I had no idea because this book is so fucking stupid. Our narrator blames the murder on his ghost and fully believes the ghost is trying to frame him for Maeve’s death, because again, that’s a perfectly reasonable assumption to make right off the bat without considering other alternatives (like tripping on mushrooms).
There were some truly spooky moments in Adams Fall, if you could manage to forget for a little while that they are sprinkled sparsely in an ocean of crap. Sean Desmond’s writing tends to get bogged down in superfluous details and irrelevant rambling most of the time, which distracts you from the creepiness, but there were definitely parts of the book that had me turning pages for more. There’s a great surprise reveal in the second half of the book when the narrator is attempting to uncover the identity of his specter. He thinks he has it figured out when he comes across an old story of three students who mysteriously died in a swimming pool. One of them looks quite like the ghost that has been tormenting him, so our narrator confronts him with this suspicion. The ghost neither confirms nor denies and will not elaborate on the circumstances of his death. Unsatisfied with this and unable to shake the feeling that he’s mistaken, our narrator digs deeper into the morbid history of the college and finds another murdery incident that took place a few years after the drowning. In this incident, a young woman walked into her boyfriend’s room to find him raping and torturing a sex worker he’d kidnapped and held hostage, and in his desperation to prevent her from reporting him, he carried her up to the roof to throw her off. He ended up going over with her, and they both died. The sex worker survived. When our narrator looks up a photo of this depraved murderer, he turns out to be the younger brother of the one who had drowned and is, in fact, our narrator’s ghost.
So, now we know we’re dealing with an unambiguously evil spirit. We also know why our narrator was singled out to be haunted, and it’s because he lives in the same room that the murder ghost lived in (before the murder part). But things get fuzzy again at this point, and it’s even harder to understand what’s actually happening because our narrator really lets himself go. He stops going to class; he has essentially given up on his thesis; he retreats from his handful of friends and from Rosie (honestly, doing her a favor); and he develops bronchitis from sleeping on the roof in the cold every night because that’s where he’s most likely to encounter his ghost and he’s obsessed with seeing him. He frequently complains of having a fever and there’s no indication he’s seeking medical treatment. In fact, he just continues to self-medicate with tequila and weed. So, as before with Maeve’s death, when our narrator wakes up one morning and discovers Maeve’s mangled body rotting in his bathtub, I chalked it up to a gross hallucination. My understanding at this point was that Maeve had in fact died in the tunnels and her body had been left behind. So how the fuck did it get in his bathtub?
I don’t have an answer for that and neither does the novel. My best guess is that our narrator never took Maeve down into the tunnels the night she died and they went back to his room instead. The ghost keeps telling our narrator that he raped Maeve but there is zero evidence, real, imaginary or otherwise, to suggest that that’s true. Their prior sexual encounters were 100% consensual so I don’t know if that was the ghost’s crime bleeding over into this one or if he was just messing with our narrator’s head for the millionth time. Either way, something must have gone wrong and our narrator ended up murdering Maeve and decided to conceal her body in the bathroom. Honestly, it’s a weak theory with tons of holes, but I am truly at a loss.
The reason I am operating under the assumption that Maeve is in fact in the bathtub is because Rosie walks in and sees her. She is understandably horrified and tries to run, bludgeoning our narrator’s leg with a hammer in self-defense, but he subdues her and knocks her unconscious. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice there are direct parallels between the murder ghost’s crime and our narrator’s actions in this epicly confusing climax. Following in the ghost’s footsteps, he drags Rosie up to the roof, though he insists to us and to himself that he has no intention of harming her further. What he really wants is a final showdown between him and the murder ghost. He confronts him with all of his pent up rage and insanity which has to be truly terrifying at this point. Ultimately, he throws the ghost off the roof and believes doing so has set him free from the haunting, and he passes out from relief. When he comes to, the police are putting handcuffs on him and leading him down to their squad cars to arrest him. He keeps telling them his story about how the ghost tried to frame him and that the ghost is actually responsible for Maeve’s death. But what he doesn’t realize is that they are arresting him for Rosie’s death because when he thought he was disposing of his ghost, he was actually throwing Rosie off the roof, completing the murder map the ghost laid out for him. The police never mention finding Maeve in the bathtub so I am STILL unclear as to what happened to her or if anyone cares (#justiceformaeve).
Our narrator is deemed unfit to stand trial and is committed to some type of institution instead. There’s a weird moment where he seems to imply that he is faking being insane to avoid real jail time but, like…buddy, you ARE insane. You don’t need to convince anyone.
So I have two distinct problems with Adams Fall. The first is that I still have no idea how the screenwriters can claim that Abandon was an adaptation of this novel. It is GENEROUS to use the phrase “loosely based.” Reading this book as a companion to the movie is entirely useless. I learned NOTHING from the book that helped me understand the movie, and there was nothing about the movie that could be interpreted as a recreation of the events of the book. If you wanted to read Adams Fall specifically for that purpose, DO NOT.
However, if you enjoy an unreliable narrator and feel up to the challenge of figuring out what the fuck this book was about, proceed at your own risk. My second problem with Adams Fall is essentially that I found it pointless as a story in general. If there was supposed to be a lesson, moral or message, I have no idea what it is. Hell, I couldn’t even tell you how much of what happened was actually real. Books that want to generate a feeling of chaos have to be, ironically, very well plotted and structured. It’s so easy to lose the thread of reason and purpose if authors are not careful, and once they lose that, I find myself wondering what was the point. I don’t always hate unreliable narrators, and I think the descent into madness can be very compelling and scary if done properly. But this book does not do it properly, in my opinion, and I spent most of the novel simply being frustrated by not knowing what was happening.
As confusing and weird as the plot in Abandon was, it still manages to make more sense than this book. Is it a good movie? You know the answer to that if you’ve listened to our podcast episode. But is it better than this book? Heck yeah.
I’ll finish on this hot take. If they had taken the things that were working in Adams Fall and used that content for a spooky supernatural thriller, I think that would actually be an amazing movie (that I would never see because supernatural thrillers scare me, but I bet Dawn would love it).
Thanks for reading! I hope everyone has a wonderful day (except for you, Sean Desmond)!
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