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. 

Review: The Rest of us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

 

Rating: 1/5 stars

CW for the book/review: mention of eating disorders, alcoholism, OCD/anxiety, emotional abuse

Here’s a milestone on this blog: my first bona fide rant.

The only reason this isn't one star is because, despite the overall mediocrity of the book, I still loved the premise - a bunch of normal kids just trying to get their goddamn high school diploma while in the background the Chosen Ones fall in love with vampires and summon mythological beings and blow up the school (multiple times). (NB: because of the thing mentioned in the rant at the bottom, I've revised my rating to 1 star, lmao.)

At the beginning, I thought that I just didn't like this because it was set in a high school; let's be real here, a high school is the most boring place on Earth and the only reason to use it as a setting is so that high schoolers can relate to it. Which is obviously completely fine, but if you're like me and haven't been in high school for a few years, it's pretty boring.

But it wasn't just because it was in high school that it was boring. The whole thing was just... fucking boring?

Also, the whole vibe of this was that these were the "ordinary kids" except they... weren't, really? Mikey and Mel's mother is a state senator running for Congress or the Actual Senate (idk I'm not sure, I'm not American so I'm not entirely sure how this shit works), and Henna's parents are going on this charity/missionary thing to Africa during the summer and taking her with them. Obviously it would be boring if they were completely ordinary, but I feel like a lot of the point of this book was portraying the characters as an "everyman" sort of character who everyone could relate to, and they... weren't, really.

But one thing that WAS relatable was a great portrayal of mental illness, specifically bulimia and OCD, and a turbulent home life, including an alcoholic father and an emotionally absent mother (I don't want to call her emotionally abusive because I'm not entirely sure that's the right term for it, but she's definitely Not Great).

I liked the metaphor of the adults not believing all the supernatural shit going on even though they saw the same shit when they were teens, as a parallel to adults dismissing/trivialising teenager's problems because they've forgotten how turbulent adolescence can be and that it is in fact very easy to have The Worst Day of Your Life when you're young and haven't really had many days in the first place.

But I would hesitate recommending this to anyone, including teenagers. As I said, I thought at the beginning it was boring just because of high school and that I'd have loved it when I was sixteen, but after reading the rest, I don't think I would.

There was also a mention that Mikey, the MC, slept with a 27 year old woman when he was 16, and it's all kind of brushed under the rug? Literally the only thing that's said about it is that his mother was "a bit upset" and Mikey describes himself as being "a bit stupid sometimes" - like, ex-fucking-scuse me? What the hell kind of message is that sending to teenagers? It's pretty irresponsible to put this in a book marketed towards teens and to not say something like "this woman was a predator and the teenage boy wasn't at fault" or something. (I know the age of consent in some countries, including my own, is 16 but I honestly think it should be 18, with a "Romeo and Juliet" law where two minors within 2 years of each other wouldn't get prosecuted, because adults having sex with minors turns my fucking stomach. But I could rant about this all day and I'm veering off course a little, so.)

TL;DR incredibly disappointing, wasted potential, wouldn't recommend to anybody, massive failure, the end.

Review: Fellside by M.R. Carey [Horror, Mystery/Suspense]

 

Rating: 5/5 stars

M.R. Carey solidified himself in my mind as a masterful writer of horror and suspense with The Girl With All the Gifts and its sequel, so I was both nervous and excited for this - excited for the obvious reasons, and nervous because if this disappointed me, it was falling from a great height - and since this has quite mediocre ratings on Goodreads (3.5 at the time of writing), this worried me even further. 

Thankfully, this was one of the semi-regular times when Goodreads and I have differed in opinion. 

I hadn't read The Girl in a long time, so although I had a vague memory that I liked Carey's writing style a lot, I had forgotten just how good it was. This is basically the blueprint of how to write a horror/suspense novel - perfectly paced; exquisitely structured with layers of plot and mysteries that tangle and unfurl; unpretentious writing that nevertheless had some absolutely fantastic turns of phrase and descriptive flourishes without overwhelming the narrative, like just a pinch of saffron in a dish. 

There's also an absolutely stellar cast of characters. Set in a prison that's rotten and corrupt to the core, Carey introduces the most unsympathetic characters and somehow manages to twist them into being sympathetic, whereas others really are just pure evil. 

Watch out, Stephen King - you've got a challenger for the best horror/suspense writer!