darchildre | (no subject)

In other book-related news, I have finished the most recent book I've been reading, which has led me to add a column on my reading spreadsheet for "did this book lie to me about its genre?"

The Last House on Needless Street was a pretty good book - I enjoyed reading it - but despite all the marketing I've seen for it, it was not a horror novel. It's suspenseful at times, and deals (fairly obliquely) with some dark subject material, but that and a talking cat who isn't actually a cat do not a horror story make. It is an engagingly-written mystery with some effective misdirection, an interesting twist (which I won't spoil), and a satisfying conclusion - I would have enjoyed the experience of reading it a great deal more if I hadn't been waiting the whole time for the horror to show up.

ETA - This is the silliest addendum to this post, but it was going to bother me until I added it. This book is explicitly set in Washington state - I would guess western Washington from the descriptions of the setting. (Characters also spend some time in Oregon, which I'm less familiar with.) I live in western Washington and while I don't claim to be a wildlife/plantlife expert, I do know some things. Such as:

- northern flickers are common in Washington year round. No one is going to put that in a local newspaper as a rare bird sighting.
- there are native paper birches in some parts of Washington, but only up near the Canadian border - you don't see them often. If you want a tree with stark white bark that's native and common, you want an alder. I promise they resemble bones enough for your spooky purposes.
- okay, this one is moot if the book is meant to be set east of the mountains and I will freely admit that but if as I believe it's set in western Washington, there are no rattlesnakes here. There are no native venomous snakes west of the Cascades.
- there are definitely no cottonmouths oh my god. (The cottonmouth may have been misidentified/a hallucination but also its inclusion made me crazy.)

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That's good to know--I almost started reading that awhile back, but something about the writing of the first page annoyed me, so I stopped and moved to something else, planning to come back when I was in a different mood. I would've been really annoyed if I'd continued and then been waiting for the horror to show up, too.

I might pick it back up sometime, but knowing that it's not really horror and that the cat is not really a cat moves it to the back of my ridiculously long to-read list.

Yeah. It's a pretty good mystery novel, I think (though I can definitely see the narrative voice of some of the characters being offputting), so still worth reading if that's your thing, but it's good to know what the book actually is.

Your ETA just makes me even more glad I put off reading this book. Things like that bother the crap out of me. It completely ruined the tail end of Claire North's "The End of the Day" because there is NOT a shuttle from the Miami airport to freaking Disney, that is a nearly 5 hour drive, and that's easily google-able. Given how much the main character travels in that book, it made me go "oh, so she didn't even do basic research on those places and probably all the other places I read about were wholly inaccurate, too". See also: almost every book set in Alabama written by someone not from there.

Edited 2022-02-14 17:42 (UTC)

Yeah - I can let stuff go if it's just incidental details that don't matter to the story as a whole (the northern flicker isn't important, it just bugs me), but the rest of them are significant to the story and if you're going to include a detail that's significant to the story in some way, you have to make sure it fits or explain why it's there if it doesn't.

Or, alternately, don't give me details about where the setting is in the real world - there's no in-story need for this to be set in Washington state. If it had been set in "Somewhere Generic, USA", I would have figured it was the southeast because of the cottonmouths and let the rest be.