Every Sigh, the End: A Novel About Zombies

Jason S. Hornsby
Permuted Press
$15.95

Rarely do I come away from a novel feeling like I’ve just received an ass kicking. I’ve read books that lead me to believe I wasn’t the intended audience the author had in mind, books that were too pretentious for their own good and books that just plain sucked. Before Jason S. Hornsby’s Every Sigh, the End, however, I had never finished a novel that left me feeling both slightly stupid and altogether pleased.

The initial plot is straightforward enough. Ross Orringer, on the cusp of the new millennium, leads a relatively pointless and mediocre life. His girlfriend, Lydia, is vapid and sleeps around on him. His best friend, Preston, has coerced him into starting a business selling copies of schlock films over the Internet. His sister Cordelia, whom he treats with utter contempt, is earning a graduate degree and lording her superiority over him. Ross is apathetic and looks down on almost everyone as if life is meaningless and the bonds of blood and friendship are as thin as the silk cast out from an arachnid’s spinnerets. He doesn’t like his parents, hates his sister, harbors a deep-seated dislike of his best friend that he buries beneath layers of booze and pot and, above all, doesn’t like himself all that much.

Ross notices, in between his snarky comments and banal discussions with his friends, that something just might be happening to him. He thinks he sees people following him, watching his apartment, observing his every move with cameras and other surveillance equipment. His mother’s acting funny, his father is cryptic and strangers on the street treat him as if he’s a marked man. None of this makes any sense, however, as his life is but the tiniest of insignificant existences.

At a party he’s almost too old to be attending, Ross’ life begins to fall apart. People he could care less about mill around Preston’s house on New Year’s Eve, getting drunk, getting high, dragging each other into darkened rooms for quick gropes. At some point, though, just as the festivities peak, reality shatters and utter madness descends upon the group of oblivious twenty-somethings.

The dead have crashed the party, and they’re not alone.

Zombies pour in from the street, from the back yard, from houses next door. Guests are attacked and devoured before Ross’ disbelieving eyes. Behind the shambling dead, a camera crew records their every move, stopping to reapply makeup or redo subpar scenes. It seems like theatrics, but the dead around him are very, very real.

Past this point, any further plot description could possibly be considered spoiler territory, so I’ll leave straightforward rehashing alone. From this point on, in the novel, things become disjointed. Time skips back and forth, the plot meanders and deepens and Ross becomes more and more alone in a world gone straight to hell. People cannot be trusted, and in some places the narrative itself seems rather unreliable. It becomes, at some point, nearly four hundred dense pages of mind-dissolver.

I had every reason to hate this book when I first started reading it. Ross Orringer is an incredible douchebag, bitter, full of self-hate and condescension towards everyone and everything he sees. He is the blueprint on which all other dislikable protagonists could be modeled. I realized this the moment he began his commentary on the party’s other attendees, which was on the fifth page, and yet I found myself caring about him despite my intense dislike for both his attitude and his hypocrisy. I honestly wanted to see him not only survive but come out on top, surprisingly enough.

I have a love-hate relationship with overly gimmicky writing styles. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. Every Sigh, the End employs several of them, from bolding one word every time it appears on the page to repeating the same phrase over and over again until each new instance of it is noticeable from several paragraphs away. It began, after a while, to sneak into my peripheral vision. The book is divided into several sections, each with their own lengthy and obscure titles. The chapters within the sections are also numbered in reverse order, including zero chapters. Included in the novel are stories-within-stories also told from Ross’ perspective, only he’s now recounting his ordeal to someone he cannot see, and he is in a different time period (even a different year) than the goings on of the main plot. There are plots outside of plots, plots within the plots, plots that seem to erase each other and moments where time jumps back and forth almost as if there are parallel universes at work.

All this, combined with the pretentiousness of the main character and his intimates, would normally irritate me to the point of setting the book down, saying “Hell with this,” and moving on to something a bit more straightforward. I’m glad it had the nearly opposite effect, as I would have missed out on one hell of a novel had I done that. I took Every Sigh, the End with me everywhere I went for about two weeks, reading in restaurants, in my car between classes and before going to sleep at night once I’d finished studying for my finals. It took longer to read than it normally would have because the pace of my life went into overdrive for a while, so that may have had some affect on my comprehensive abilities, but it still remains that this is not a traditional novel in any sense of the word.

Looking back on it now, there are several reasons why this book worked so well when others probably would have garnered nothing but scorn. First and foremost, Hornsby’s an excellent storyteller. The action doesn’t start for quite some time, and yet the set up is anything but boring. I’ve also known people like Ross, Preston and Lydia. I haven’t liked them but I’ve known them, and having been familiar with that kind of person and those kind of parties gives the story a sense of realism that another novel might not have. I found myself laughing when Ross lists the titles his video company sells and muses on the kind of losers who buy them, mostly because I’ve seen half of them (I actually own copies of several) and are at least aware of the others. Like him or not (you probably won’t), there’s a good chance you’ll relate to at least one aspect of his life or another. Finally, I sometimes appreciate, possibly even require, a work of fiction that forces me to exercise my brain a bit more than it’s used to. It keeps me on my toes, challenges me to read a bit deeper and with a bit more concentration than I normally would and helps me expand my imagination. This book did all that, and because the benefits outweighed the bizarreness I was more than happy to overlook and in some places enjoy things that might normally put me off rather quickly.

It’s not everyone’s cup of tea (his preface is both the meanest and funniest I’ve read), but anyone with a tolerance for non-linear narratives ought to check this novel out, even if only for the “What the hell did I just read?” moment that comes once the last page is turned. There’s a lot of stuff going on in this story, most (possibly even all) of it incredible, but a lot of work needs to go into absorbing it. Even now, I’m not sure I took everything Hornsby intended away from the novel. Only a second reading will guarantee I understood the plot in its entirety, but that doesn’t in any way take away from the hours of snarky fun I had reading it the first time.