There are thrillers that frighten you with what waits in the dark, and then there are thrillers that frighten you with what smiles at you in the light. Soft Erasure by A.D. Levenson belongs firmly to the second kind and it unsettled me in a way I did not quite expect when I turned the first page.
The premise is quietly monstrous. Amber finds herself in a world where care has been rebranded as control. She wears a bracelet, sleek, unremarkable, almost a piece of jewellery that rewards her with points each time she complies, and quietly strips them away each time she does not. Eat what you are told. Say what you are meant to. Want what the system has already decided you should want. Every small surrender earns her a little glow of approval; every flicker of self costs her something. It is such a chillingly ordinary object, this bracelet, and that is precisely what makes it linger long after you set the book down. We have all felt, at some point, that soft pressure to be agreeable, to be manageable, to be good. Levenson simply makes that pressure literal and clips it to a woman’s wrist.
What Levenson does so well and what the whole novel turns on is the horror of being controlled by the very people meant to help you. There is no cackling villain here, no obvious monster. There are soft voices and kind faces and reasonable-sounding rules, and somehow that is far more frightening than any knife in the shadows. Amber’s slow realisation that comfort and captivity can look almost identical is the beating heart of the book, and in its strongest moments Soft Erasure had me genuinely uneasy on her behalf.
The opening is superb. The tension coils tight and early, the world unfolds with real menace, and I found myself gripped, reading far past the hour I had meant to stop. If the whole novel had held that pitch, this would have been an easy favourite of the year.
But somewhere around the middle, the story loosens its grip. The narrative grows convoluted, threads multiply, and – my chief frustration – the internal monologues stretch on and on. Amber thinks, and rethinks, and circles back to think again, and while I understand the intent, to trap us inside her spiralling mind, the effect is that the momentum drains away. A psychological thriller should feel like a tightening noose; here it slackens just when it ought to pull. I found myself wishing Levenson had trusted the plot to carry the dread, rather than narrating so much of it to me.
Still, I closed the book curious rather than disappointed. This is the first instalment of The Caldren Program, and as an opening chapter to a larger, darker design, it does its work. It disturbs, it lingers, and it leaves the door ajar.
A flawed but genuinely unsettling beginning. I’ll be back for the next one.
My Rating: 3/5
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
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