Review: The House by Eden Darry [Horror]
Rating: 1/5 stars
This review contains mild to moderate spoilers. Proceed at your own risk, although I wouldn't recommend reading this book in the first place so it's kind of a moot point.
Bold Strokes Books usually blows it out of the water, so I suppose it was inevitable that something like this would happen eventually.
Like The Upstairs Room and The Little Stranger, this is a novel about a (potentially) haunted house. One of the most classic horror tropes there is, there's a hundred thousand minefields you need to be sure not to step in so your book is actually engaging, and The House manages to stand in all of them.
I'm not a horror buff. I've only seen a handful of horror films, and 6.3% of the books I've read have been horror. (Shoutout to past me's diligent Goodreads tagging that allowed me to do the math.) But even I knew exactly where this was going, and what the twists would be, and what every single trope was.
Here are some tropes I noticed, none of which were executed particularly well.
- Moving to a country house with vaguely bad juju but hell, it's ridiculously cheap!
- A child has an imaginary friend, called Koosh.
- The other child has psychic dreams.
- A journal of a Victorian inhabitant of the house is discovered, called Nathanial Cushion. Yes, Cushion, like Koosh, which of course does not get noticed by Fin. Because I, and most readers, am not as stupid as these characters, I noticed immediately. It should also be noted that the first diary entry Fin reads dates from 1888, which seems a lot like a very heavy-handed connection to Jack the Ripper. We get it, he's evil.
- The bad guy is the Baddest Bad Guy To Ever Bad, a misogynistic sociopathic murderer who is terrible in every way. Men like this do, obviously, exist; the issue isn't that it isn't realistic, but that it is boring.
- Fin starts to be angry and verbally vicious after moving into the house. Instead of a slow build-up, however, it comes completely out of leftfield.
- Fin finds a trapdoor. This is cliche enough as it is, but of course the trapdoor slams shut behind her. And of course this passageway is a keystone of the denouement.
- Fin's related to the Evil Victorian Ghost, because it wasn't cliche enough already.
The writing itself was... average. Nothing exciting, just something to hang the plot off like scaffolding, but nothing bad either.
You may potentially enjoy this book if you have lived under a rock your entire life and have literally no knowledge of horror tropes. Otherwise, you'll see everything a mile off and roll your eyes the whole way through.
Needless to say, I do not recommend.
