I picked up “The Bus on Thursday” by Shirley Barrett because the cover has a disembodied hand on it. It’s creepy and striking, much like disembodied hands are when they don’t appear on book covers. After reading the first sentence (“I was at work scratching my armpit.”), I knew I’d have to read the whole book. Would the scratching alleviate or aggravate the itch in her pit? These are the sort of hooks novelists spend their lives searching for.
Immediately, subsequent sentences turn the outcome of the itch into a triviality: she’d discovered a lump, and it was cancer. Soon after being told she won’t be able to have kids until her late 30s, her best friend announces her own pregnancy on social media with a particularly annoying post. Eleanor decides to move from the big city and take a teaching job in small, cute, and creepy town. She’s replacing a beloved teacher who recently disappeared, and she can move into the teacher’s former home, complete with thirty plus locks on the door, immediately. Between the missing teacher and the preponderance of locks on her door, the reader may venture to assume something strange is afoot.
Some reviewers have complained that Barrett’s voice is whiny. I’d counter, given the cancer, mastectomy, the ending of a long-term relationship just prior to her diagnosis, the existence of social media, the things that happen after her move that I won’t spoil, and the fact that the novel is presented as a series of, what people in the blogging industry refer to as, “personal blog posts,” her “whiny” or “mean-spirited” tone is justified and also doesn’t have to be justified. Plus, her words are frequently hilarious.
Given that a lot of books have been written, and a lot of people have had cancer, I bet there are other funny books that begin with a cancer diagnosis and the ordeals a patient goes through, but I doubt many of them find much time for a disembodied hand or a really creepy bus. Fewer still probably feature a priest attempting to exorcise a demon (the one he believes gave her cancer, naturally) from the narrator. I bet none includes a scene in which the narrator bites the priest’s leg and gets some of his meat in her teeth. Probably lots of them feature a hunk that might be a werewolf, but some experiences are nearly universal, and literature is bound to reflect this.
