As far as horror titles go, The Day We Ate Grandad is top tier.
It’s attention-grabbing, immediately intriguing, and strikes an appropriately disaffected, semi-regretful tone that suggests, “hey, we didn’t *want* to eat him, but we just kinda *had* to, you know?”
Although The Day We Ate Grandad is actually the third book in Rosens’ Pagham-on-Sea contemporary cosmic horror series, I must confess that it was the first that I read. Why? Well, that incredible title! Also, the blurb on the back of the book sounded far more interesting to me (i.e. utterly unique) than those of its predecessors, The Crows and Thirteenth.
The good news is that while The Day We Ate Grandad was easy enough to follow without having read either of the prior two novels, it’s obvious that the characters and their conflicts would have felt far richer had I been more diligent in my homework. Regardless, I thoroughly enjoyed the novel as a standalone read and, yes, I am now invested enough to want to go back and consume the others as well as any subsequent novels that Rosens will undoubtedly add to her already impressive legendarium.
So what is The Day We Ate Grandad about?
It’s a British kitchen sink soap opera about the apocalypse. More or less.
Wes Porter is a wealthy, antisocial playboy whose nascent sobriety has some curious side effects. Specifically, he can see the future. Or, even more specifically, he can see a handful of possible futures. Hence the novel’s gripping tagline:
“Three possible futures. Two versions of the apocalypse. One chance to save the world.”
You see, the Porter family is an ancient, cult-like family of eldritch entities. Wes’ younger sister Katy is currently the de facto leader of the family following her recent mutation into a ravenous, flesh-eating eldritch god (itself a fulfilment of her prophetic destiny as the thirteenth child of a thirteenth child). Yet despite her enormous power, she really just wants to live a normal life and finish university.
However, when Wes is alerted to a subset of the family cult wanting to bring about the actual apocalypse by breaching dimensions to bring the family’s original progenitor — the Porters’ titular grandfather — into the realm of our reality, Wes, Katy, and their soothsayer cousin Ricky must band together to outwit those who would stop at nothing to end the world.
As far as stakes go, you can’t get much bigger. But Rosens describes her series as “cosmic horror family drama” — so it’s not just about the decimation of humanity. It’s also something of a soap opera. Imagine, if you will, Eastenders or Hollyoaks but where the characters are tentacled monsters.
That’s sort of what The Day We Ate Grandad feels like: a lot of petty drama, vehement grudges, and bountiful backstabbing conducted by a cast of scheming narcissists who each believe themselves to be the main character.
It’s classic soap opera territory. We’re not supposed to like these people, but we do anyway. Their bad behavior is like a car crash we can’t bring ourselves to look away from. It’s fascinating. It’s addictive.
Wes — the central character of Grandad — is the epitome of this. He is an antihero for the ages: a spoiled rich kid who is callous, manipulative, and never entirely trustworthy. Yet fate has conspired to make him responsible for saving the world.
Because — lest we forget — for all the bleak, turbulent, toxic shenanigans that unfold, it does so against the giant threat of cosmic horror. That’s what The Day We Ate Grandad is ultimately about: an unlikely group of heroes struggling to save a world that doesn’t really care for them.
And that shit’s powerful!
Add in the novel’s themes of generational trauma and grief, all-too-human fallibilities such as addiction and self-sabotage, plus the more genre-centric elements of body horror, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftian monstrosities, and The Day We Ate Grandad is a delicious cocktail of horror fiction that is entirely — and so-so-refreshingly — very different.
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Lol what a title