Matt Ingwalson’s CHATTERHAT is a book about dark secrets lurking under a quiet, seemingly mundane suburban community. On the one hand, half the community seems obsessed with surveillance and with the recordings made by their WAR (We Are Recording) and WWII (WebWorld We Are Recording II) doorbell cameras, ostensibly trying to track down a goat-creature who some believe is eating their cats. The other half are trying to hide secrets of every sort, from naughty parties to Bob’s work as a milk deliveryman for Moo Cow to the identity of the mysterious Joe Mead, one of three survivors of a workplace massacre (the others being Bob’s neighbor, Jacob and the lovely Kristy Lee McIlvinney, who miss the shooting due to having left the party for a spontaneous sexual encounter upstairs).

Bob is very good both at getting others to tell him their secrets and (he believes) concealing his own, making him the perfect protagonist for this sort of story, where nothing whatsoever is as it seems. He’s emotionally detached from everything and everyone, not even able to remember his neighbors’ names most days, and at times his quest feels like a desperate search for human connection, for something that’s real among all the hidden secrets and buried pasts. As readers unravel the threads of the story with him, his own carefully-crafted cool comes unwoven, too, and he seems less and less in control of the situation and of his own actions. This is a strange little book that rewards a second reading to dig out all the little subtleties and references, from beginning to the very end. There are very few throwaway details here – everything means something, and it’s all tied together somehow, even if it’s not really always clear how. Everyone’s wearing some sort of mask in the story, whether real or metaphorical, and even the suburb itself starts to feel like a mask, a carefully constructed false reality concealing a dark morass of secrets and crimes. The story itself is engaging, a mystery that keeps the revelations coming until the very last page, full of action and mysterious encounters. I

Alternately playful and dark, Matt Ingwalson’s CHATTERHAT offers a world of entertainingly strange secrets bubbling just under the quiet façade of mundane suburban life.

~Catherine Langrehr for IndieReader