The Digital Wallpaper - Anna Maeve - ★★.½

AUTHOR: Anna Maeve

GENRE: Retelling, Psychological Suspense.

RATING: 2.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: A futuristic retelling of the classic short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. Started well, but as it progressed, it left me confused and disappointed. Needs much editing.

Story Synopsis:

Emily and her husband John have just moved into a futuristic “smart home”. John is quite enthusiastic about the new residence, but Emily feels an immediate sense of unease and can’t settle in comfort. The digital wallpaper, with its constantly shifting and mesmerising patterns, is especially responsible for making Emily feel like she’s being watched, even haunted by some artificial presence. John is insistent that the house is perfectly fine and that it is Emily’s mental health that is questionable. Will Emily’s increasing obsession with the wallpaper and her paranoia alleviate with time?

The story comes to us in Emily’s third person perspective.

Many of us might have read the classic short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It highlights how a combination of post-partum depression and the controversial “rest cure” resulted in the narrator’s deep-dive into a strange psychosis. This indie novella takes the essence of the same premise but gives it a futuristic twist. Some of it works, some needs a bit more fine-tuning.

On the positive side, I love the techie twist given to the original. The concept of a digital wallpaper that uses hallucinatory art to play with the mind of its target is stunning. Emily’s pareidolia is also put to good use.

The story is a psychological suspense, and in that sense, it works well. I am still not sure of the borders between Emily’s reality and her delusions. So many scenes left me muddled about whether they actually occurred or were just imagined by Emily in her intensified psych state. It felt like the author was going beyond her character and toying with my mind as well. Creepy!

In many ways, this debut work is as bizarre as the original, with the ending being equally abrupt. However, a part of me feels that the third-person narrative voice is one reason why I wasn’t as affected by Emily’s turmoils, as by Gilman’s unnamed narrator with her surreal first person perspective in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’.

The story is divided in ten chapters. Such divisions aren’t common in short fiction, but they usually work well for establishing a change of scene. This time though, a few chapters seemed to begin with a kind of recap of what had already occurred. I am not sure if this story was originally written for some kind of an episodic release, but if it is to be read as a single short story, these redundancies must be removed.

In fact, the whole story needs a firm round of editing to fix the continuity gaps and cull out the repetitions. Many scenes and lines create déjà vu. The time jumps are too long and too frequent, and sometimes, don’t make sense. The chapter titles also act as spoilers.

There are so many questions left unanswered. I can understand some things not being clarified to intensify the psychological impact on the reader, but here, the questions far outnumber the explanations. Why did the tech not work on John? Why didn't Emily leave him after learning his intent? How did she not know her own husband’s medical specialty? Are they newly married that she is so blank about him? No idea.

The Goodreads blurb reveals a lot more about the characters than is present in the story. Like, I didn’t even know Emily was a tech journalist until I reread the blurb. But this background doesn’t make sense in the context of the story, where she seems to be a Luddite.

All in all, the content shows tremendous imagination, and attempts to go deeper into how mental manipulations occur through technology. The story tries hard to follow the flow of the original classic, while still incorporating enough novelties. The sincerity with which this tale has been nourished cannot be doubted. But earnestness can go only so far. Until the writing issues are fixed and the overall flow tightened, the story won’t satisfy at the same level as the classic. It’s a valiant attempt, though.

One last point of feedback. The sober-looking cover doesn't suit this work. It needs to feel more psychedelic, more out-of-the-box to match the eccentricity of the tale.

My thanks to author Anna Maeve for providing me with a complimentary copy of “The Digital Wallpaper”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.

This book is currently available free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.