Reading with teafortiffany

Hello friends!!!

I am so sorry that I have been gone. My partner and I have been dealing with bats in our walls. That’s right, bats in our walls. So, needless to say, we had a bunch of sleepless nights and had to hire a specialist to come out to help us remove the bats and set the house up so that we don’t get more. I had actually had something written out last weekend, but I didn’t think that the quality was very good, and I did not have the mental capacity to make it any better.

That being said, I have recovered some more energy and processing power. I also don’t have any bats in the house. We do, however, still have to deal with some cleanup and repair from cutting into the walls. Good news, it’s in a spare room that isn’t used right now, so we can take our time to get it all sorted out.

Enough of my depressing week, let’s get into the review!

Thank you to NetGalley and Ballantine for providing me with a copy of this novel in return for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

I am still exploring horror novels and finding out what I enjoy. So far, I have found that I like to read stories with ghosts, sentient plants, and just creepy situations. I was sent an email from the publisher to check out this novel because I had previously enjoyed a thriller from the same publisher. I was so excited. This was a chance to adventure further into the sentient house side of horror. I have previously enjoyed novels that have this type of house in them; however, they have been in cozy novels or fantasy novels, so I was excited to get the opportunity to read this novel. 

This novel is about Claire and her family who move into a beautiful old house. It doesn’t take long after Claire and her family move in for Claire to realize that there is something special about this old house. Things begin to vanish in the house, and nobody but Claire and her husband seem to remember them ever existing. Not only that, but this house seems to attract a particular sort of person that you don’t want around.

The beginning of this novel starts quite slow. While we get an idea of the quirks the house presents pretty early on, the meat of the story takes a while to appear. I really did enjoy learning about the house and seeing how Claire interacted with it. As a sentient house, there is a personality to it. It almost feels a bit youthful in a way. Almost innocent. Just like everyone else, the house is just trying to survive.

Of course, this is more than just a house that eats the dead. We are starting to see changes in the family members as well. The youngest daughter is no longer as dependent on her parents as before. Their teenage son has a newfound confidence and appears to be getting along well in his new school. Claire begins to discover that this is partially due to the house speaking to the children in unique ways. Not only does the house eat the dead, but it eats the memories of what it consumes. This was probably what made it so interesting. I love an object with sentience and personality.

The ending of the novel, I felt, was a little predictable, but not necessarily in the way I thought it would be. I won’t go into specifics, but I did end up enjoying the way that it comes to an end. The closure felt good, and I liked that we got some epilogue action. I personally am not a fan of books that just end after the action has completed. I love to see how the characters deal with what they have gone through and if anything has changed for them because of it.

One thing I would like to see is a warning about pet death. I know it’s a horror novel and it’s meant to make you uncomfortable, but at the same time, when I realized what was happening, I had to immediately skip ahead. That’s just one of those events that I don’t like reading about in any genre. That’s not to say I think it was a bad choice for the author; I would just like to be given the option to skip the description because of how deeply it tends to affect me as a reader.

I would say that this is a pretty solid read for someone who is still relatively new to the horror genre. I’m not sure how veteran readers would enjoy it, but I had a good time with it. The pacing was a bit slow to start with, but I ended up finishing the last 30% of the book in one sitting because I just needed to know what was going to happen. I already ended up recommending this to one of my librarian friends because he is also reading more horror novels. I think in the end, it deserves at least a 4-star review from me. I can’t really think of anything that would drop that down any lower, so that’s where I’ve landed.

4 ★

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That’s it for this go. I hope that this review was not completely awful after my edits. I wanted to give the book the review it deserved, and so I took more time. For my transgression, I do plan on putting up another blog post this week that I’ve been waiting to post until I caught up on some ARCs.

I’ll see you again later this week!!

Bye friends!!!