In “The Anything Room”, Lonnie Busch crafts a poignant meditation on grief, desire, and the fragile line between reality and possibility. Set in a crumbling St. Louis neighborhood, this novel explores life and death through a magic portal that can turn back time.
The story unfolds around Martin Moffett’s discovery of a strange portal in his newly purchased bungalow. Through this gateway, he discovers he can visit his deceased wife Noreen in an alternate reality, an opportunity that proves both seductive and potentially treacherous. Parallel to Martin’s story runs his son Kenny’s journey between two loves: his pregnant wife Elaine and his murdered high school flame Vickie, whom he can now visit through the same portal. A third subplot follows Kenny’s teenage stepsister Beth as she prepares to testify against her father in a murder trial.
Busch excels at world-building without boring the reader with excessive exposition. The mechanics of the portal emerge organically through the characters’ experiences and their interactions with Falco, the enigmatic magician who serves as its gatekeeper. The alternate reality operates by its own internal logic – memories reshape themselves, time bends, and the dead possess an unsettling autonomy that defies the visitors’ expectations. This creates a compelling tension between desire and reality, as characters discover that even in a world of their desires, not all may be perfect.
It is largely “The Anything Room”‘s psychological depth and believable characters that distinguish it from typical supernatural fare. Martin’s inability to process his wife’s death manifests in increasingly desperate attempts to preserve their relationship in the portal world. Kenny’s idealization of his high school romance with Vickie collides with the complexities of adult relationships and responsibilities. Beth’s testimony against her father could be said to represent yet another kind of portal – the threshold between childhood and adult understanding of moral complexity.
The secondary characters deserve special attention. Falco emerges as far more than a mysterious story device, revealing himself as a tragic figure whose own experiences with the portal serve as a warning. The relationships between Beth and Kenny, and between Martin and his new wife Janelle, explore the complicated dynamics of blended families with commendable sensitivity. Furthermore, Busch’s prose style shifts expertly between the grounded details of everyday life – the smell of river mud, the rattle of trains, the taste of gas station coffee – and the luminous unreality of the portal world. This contrast anchors the supernatural elements while highlighting the extraordinary nature of ordinary existence.
As the story progresses, it becomes clear that “The Anything Room” is not merely about the possibility of reclaiming lost love, but about the price of refusing to accept loss itself. The portal serves as both escape and trap, offering infinite possibilities while threatening to sever the characters’ connections to their actual lives. The ending of the book resists easy resolution, leaving readers to grapple with questions about the nature of love and acceptance of its loss. Busch suggests that true healing might require finding a way to integrate loss into life rather than trying to undo it.
This ambitious novel succeeds on multiple levels – as a supernatural thriller, as literary fiction, and as a philosophical exploration. Busch challenges readers to examine their own relationship with loss while offering a unique perspective on how memory and desire shape our understanding of what is real. For fans of “The Midnight Library”, “The Anything Room” offers a deeply moving exploration of grief, second chances, and the blurred lines between reality and possibility—an unforgettable story that will stay with readers long after the final page.
You can purchase “The Anything Room” by Lonnie Busch here!
