Review: When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole
When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole is a thriller that follows Sydney, a black woman who has recently moved back in with her ill mother and family friend after a divorce, and Theo, a white man who just bought the house across the street from Sydney with his mostly ex-girlfriend, Kim. The book is largely about gentrification, race, and class and how these topics intertwine. It has a strong focus on family and community, in a way I thought was really powerful.
This book is very often pitched as "Get Out" meets something (my something is a Riley Sager book I don't want to mention because it would spoil the ending of whichever of the two you hadn't read, but if you have read it, you totally know) which really should have prepared me for some of the more horror elements of this book. I don't think I can expand on this well without spoilers, but I found a little bit of the villain behavior cartoony and much more overt than I was expecting. Which is totally fine; I just was expecting a more subtle creeping villainy. Though I will say that I do think that I might feel differently if this were a movie.
The book switches between Sydney and Theo's points of view, building the story separately until the two begin to work together on Sydney's walking tour of Black Brooklyn start-up. Both characters are experiencing financial and personal problems that are threatening to upend their lives. These issues push the two together, and the more they research the history of Brooklyn, the more ties they are able to make to the gentrifying neighborhood, and the more trouble might be coming for them.
Something that didn't really work for me was the pacing of this book. I was certainly worried for these characters and interested in what was going to come next (I read the book in two or three sittings), but I didn't feel the bone-chilling suspense I wanted to. I would guess the pacing wouldn't have bothered me if I hadn't guessed what was going to happen. I felt confused at times about the tone of the creepy scenes, you are meant to feel unnerved, but I was mostly just questioning the way both main characters reacted to these events. I spent most of the first 60% of the book waiting for a reveal I guessed half of in chapter one and the rest of once we learned a little bit more about Sydney's schedule. This would not have bothered me much, but the next reveal didn't come until the end of the book, so I had plenty of time to speculate about what was going on there too. Waiting for the reveals you know are coming does change the experience of suspense.
Staying with pacing, the book is very mixed with the speed. The beginning is very slow (which totally isn't a bad thing, a slow build is excellent in this genre), and it does slowly creep up, but then the end is an absolute mad dash. The juxtaposition of the paces was odd, a slow drip of relevant information than an absolute deluge all in the last 40ish pages. I did really like the last chapter and epilogue, more on this later, but I wish that some of the foreshadowing for these events had happened a little bit earlier. Specifically, I wanted more time with the old folks' group earlier in the novel.
I kind of think I might have liked this book more if it had been longer. I wanted more time with Theo and Kim because I completely did not understand why he ended up in such a serious relationship with someone he clearly had nothing in common with or any sort of positive relationship at all. I did like the reasoning as to why he stayed in the beginning, but why they were still together (even just living together) made zero sense to me the whole book. She was over the top evil in every aspect of her life; I did not buy that Theo, a character who is meant to be very clued into people trying to screw him over, would just have zero inkling about Kim's motivations.
The end of a book is clearly always important, but so much hangs on the end of a thriller. And I really did like the very end of this book. It is one of my favorite endings books like this can have. I don't want to give anything away, but I liked the balance Cole struck between answered and unanswered.
I also really liked that this book was about gentrification; I think Cole does an excellent job of laying out why gentrifying a neighborhood is a problem. That the 'bettering' of the neighborhood has real consequences, that structural changes happen that push members of a community out and that these people don't always have somewhere else to go. I think my confusion mentioned earlier was because I was expecting a slow, insidious exploration of the way this happens out in the open, and some of the book very much is that! I am absolutely certain mentioning exactly what about the book I didn't expect going in would spoil the book massively. I will add that I did really think the parts of the book that explored Sydney’s emotional reaction to her changing neighborhood were excellent. It really helped build the world and the inner life of the main character.
Something I absolutely loved was the structural element of telling some of the story through Our Hood, an app like Next Door where neighbors can publically chat about what is going on in the neighborhood. I thought the information shared in this part of the story was fantastically done and really helped put pieces of the puzzle together. It was also hugely entertaining at times and really helped build frustration and illustrated the divide between the established community and the new folks who felt entitled to being able to have their needs supersede the old community's wishes. I love fun structural elements and was just incredibly impressed with this!
I gave this book 3 stars on Goodreads and The StoryGraph. I would recommend this book to people who love social thrillers, to folks who want to read about community and gentrification, and to folks who want clearly defined personal stakes in their horror/thrillers!
