- Voice: Vikas Adam is the only credited voice for a book that changes grammatical person mid-story, the toughest structural demand in the production
- Big ideas: Hereditary curses, mirrors and being watched, art-world glamour with something rotten underneath
- Atmosphere: Baroque and unsettling, built on dread rather than shock
- Worth it?: Take it for the concept and the imagery, not for structural tidiness.
Horror aimed at teenagers usually keeps its monster outside the body. Ryan La Sala puts the monster behind the mirror and then makes it hereditary. Beholder opens on a penthouse party for New York's art crowd that ends with everyone dead except Athanasios Bakirtzis, who spent the massacre shut inside a bathroom by a boy he had never met and never saw again. Scholastic Audio runs the book at eleven hours and forty-six minutes with Vikas Adam credited, and the premise alone makes it one of the odder young adult audiobooks on a mainstream imprint.
Our Take on Beholder
Athan has coasted on charm and good looks his whole life, which is exactly the setup a book about mirrors wants. Karin's account fills in the mechanism the publisher copy only gestures at: the family gift lets him rewind a reflection and watch the recent past replay inside it, and his grandmother spent years warning him that the gift is a curse best left alone. He breaks that rule once, in a bathroom, on the worst possible night. Everything afterward is the bill arriving. Worth registering, since it affects how you read the star average: that same account files five stars while grading the book 4.5 rounded up in its own opening line.
What Athan is caught in takes longer to name. Something has woken inside the walls of New York and it works by suggestion, pushing the people it touches toward violence, chaos and self-destruction, and it has been watching him from behind his own reflection since childhood. The occult society material and the eldritch horror arrive braided together rather than stacked, which keeps the middle stretch from turning into a lore lecture. The corpses at the party have arranged themselves into a sculpture, which tells you the thing has taste.
Tone is where the book takes its largest risk. Beholder wants to be glamorous and repulsive at once, an art-world satire with real body horror inside it, told by a protagonist whose default mode is flirtation. When that combination works, it produces the strongest passages in the book. When it does not, the register wobbles badly enough that some listeners have called the whole thing uneven, and the wobble is a deliberate choice rather than an accident of drafting.
Why Listen to Beholder
Keith Chambers, four stars, framed it in a line worth repeating: La Sala has a genuinely unique voice in queer young adult writing, and the book feels David Lynchian at times. That comparison earns its keep. The dream logic, the sense that the setting itself is complicit, the beautiful surfaces concealing something that feeds on attention, all of it sits closer to that comparison than to the haunted-house tradition teen horror usually borrows from. That same response spells the byline La Salle rather than La Sala, an easy slip that also makes the book harder to find by search.
Set pieces justify the comparison. A massacre discovered as an arrangement rather than a mess, a reflection that runs backward while its owner stands still, a city whose walls are hosting something patient: La Sala writes images rather than jump scares, and images survive the move into audio far better than a page-turn shock does. Nothing here depends on typography or on a reveal positioned at the bottom of a right-hand page, which cannot be said of every horror novel that gets recorded.
Prose choices put an unusual demand on a single credited voice. Athan's sections shift grammatical person partway through, moving out of straightforward first person into something blended with second and third, and that transition has to register through delivery once paragraph breaks are no longer visible. The running time is also long for the category, which suits a book far more interested in mounting dread than in a body count, and gives the middle act room to be strange.
Weak Spots in Beholder
Christopher Draven files five stars and then spends the whole review taking the book apart: disjointed, and not in a purposeful way; harsh breaks between point-of-view styles; the mirror concept interesting but never fully formed. The distance between that rating and that text is the most useful thing on the product page, because it shows that some of the goodwill in the numbers is goodwill toward what the book represents rather than toward how it reads. Weigh the 4.2 across 139 ratings with that in mind.
That structural complaint is the one to take seriously before pressing play. A blended second and third person passage is hard to follow when you cannot glance back a paragraph, and Beholder switches modes at moments when the plot is also accelerating. If you already rewind fifteen seconds regularly to work out who is speaking, budget for more of that here than a young adult label would lead you to expect.
Content is the other consideration. The opening is a mass killing, the antagonistic force compels self-harm and violence in the people it reaches, and the book returns to both repeatedly rather than using them once for shock. The writing is not gratuitous, but the intensity sits closer to adult horror than the teen shelving suggests. A parent buying on the strength of that category tag deserves to know as much before it starts playing in a shared kitchen.
The Right Listener for Beholder
Queer horror listeners are the obvious audience, specifically the ones who like the genre baroque rather than grim. If your reference points are art-world decadence, cursed bloodlines and cities that are themselves complicit, this lands squarely in that territory. It also rewards patience, because the first act deliberately withholds the rules of its own magic and expects you to sit in the confusion rather than solve it early.
Anyone who needs horror kept clean of flirtation should look elsewhere. Jennifer Hutchison's three stars come down to precisely that objection: an overabundance of flirty romance inside a horror novel, plus a creep factor that registered but never converted into caring about anybody. That reaction is not a misreading of the book. Athan's charm is the engine of the thing, and if charm reads as noise to you, an entire novel of it will grind.
Come for the mirrors, stay for the sculpture, and accept that the seams show. Beholder pairs a spectacular central idea with an uneven delivery system, which strikes me as a fair trade at this length if the idea is one you want in your head. Listeners who need every element resolved will finish frustrated. Listeners who like a horror novel that leaves something still awake in the walls will not.
