As described by the publisher, the plot of David Searcy's debut novel Ordinary Horror sounds like the stuff of '40s pulp magazines. An aged, socially isolated widower, attempting to protect his beloved rose garden from gophers, responds to a cryptic ad promising organic pest-control. He subsequently receives a set of mysterious plants that arrive under suspicious circumstances and display suspicious tendencies. But the book-jacket summary tells almost none of the real story. While Searcy's book adds a few more details about the plants—they grow at an alarming rate, local pets begin to disappear, the neighbors start to act odd—the entire plotline is just one obscure and incomplete thread in a faded patchwork of vignettes, all touching on the same vaguely primordial theme of uncertain dread. Writing entirely in the present tense, mostly in long, looping run-on sentences that evoke a sensation of overextended imbalance, Searcy constructs his book more as a prose poem to an elusive emotion than as a solid story. The suspicious-plant plot is all but left behind as he explores other disquieting events in his protagonist's suburban environment, including an unidentifiable dead animal in the road, a street that's too quiet and too deserted, and a disturbed insomniac child next door who communicates in frantic black scribbles and plays on her swing-set in the middle of the night. Other elements of Searcy's "ordinary horror" are even more subtly generalized, as he evokes a vague sense of havens threatened, of terrifyingly empty internal and external spaces, of inconsistencies and incompatibilities between human beings and the world they're forced to occupy. By throwing out many examples of fundamental wrongness, Searcy weaves a web of words to capture his obscure quarry, the same subtle, haunting, something-rotten-somewhere-in-suburbia concept David Lynch expressed in Blue Velvet and Eraserhead. But why? This particular mountain is such a molehill that climbing it because it's there seems unnecessary, at least at this length, and to this degree of dry, drafty, overwrought excessiveness. Ordinary Horror successfully bypasses the genre conventions of horror, but also bypasses the genre's visceral solidity. As a novel, it wraps up about 10 pages before reaching an actual ending. As a poetic exercise, it seems about 100 pages too long.