Renfield (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
darchildre) wrote2023-03-29 08:25 pm
darchildre) wrote2023-03-29 08:25 pm
Entry tags:
(no subject)
I've been reading a lot of scifi and mysteries so far this year - I've only this weekend finished my first horror novel of 2023. Unfortunately, it was The Spite House by Johnny Compton, which was a huge disappointment. I wanted to like this book so much! Alas.
You guys, this is the least atmospheric haunted house book I've ever read. How do you write a haunted house story with no atmosphere? Atmosphere is what haunted house stories are for!
Instead of atmosphere, the book is overstuffed with supernatural whatsits that are either boring or go nowhere. There are about 20 different ghosts in this book - only three of them are interesting and only two are remotely scary. There are three people who mysteriously returned from the dead - with two of them, you can make a case for a shared cause for their resurrection, but the third (the protagonist's seven-year-old daughter) doesn't fit with that explanation at all and no other explanation is ever given. She just comes back from the dead! Nothing happens because of this - she's a little more sensitive to ghosts than the other characters but her being linked to the dead doesn't change the plot in any way. I kept waiting for the house or the ghosts to be specifically interested in her because of it but nope, nothing doing. None of the disparate supernatural elements gel into a coherent whole. I don't need explanations in my ghost fiction - that's not what ghosts are for - but I do want, like, a consistent theme. This book does not have that.
There are only about two chapters that lean into the thing that made me interested in the book in the first place, which is the idea that a spite house might actually be a house haunted by spite. I associate haunted houses with tragedy or rage - spite is such a small, mean emotion but still one that can poison everything about a person (or a house) and that's such an excellent premise for a horror story. Those two chapters are the best thing in the book and come the closest to actually being an effective horror story, but they come at about the 80% mark and aren't enough to justify what came before. And then they're over, and we still have to finish the book, which fails to bring all its threads together into anything satisfying.
Plus the author is really bad about telling-not-showing. So much telling me that a character was having an emotion instead of demonstrating it! So frustrating.
Now I'm going to have to go find myself a better horror novel to wash the boring out of my brain.
You guys, this is the least atmospheric haunted house book I've ever read. How do you write a haunted house story with no atmosphere? Atmosphere is what haunted house stories are for!
Instead of atmosphere, the book is overstuffed with supernatural whatsits that are either boring or go nowhere. There are about 20 different ghosts in this book - only three of them are interesting and only two are remotely scary. There are three people who mysteriously returned from the dead - with two of them, you can make a case for a shared cause for their resurrection, but the third (the protagonist's seven-year-old daughter) doesn't fit with that explanation at all and no other explanation is ever given. She just comes back from the dead! Nothing happens because of this - she's a little more sensitive to ghosts than the other characters but her being linked to the dead doesn't change the plot in any way. I kept waiting for the house or the ghosts to be specifically interested in her because of it but nope, nothing doing. None of the disparate supernatural elements gel into a coherent whole. I don't need explanations in my ghost fiction - that's not what ghosts are for - but I do want, like, a consistent theme. This book does not have that.
There are only about two chapters that lean into the thing that made me interested in the book in the first place, which is the idea that a spite house might actually be a house haunted by spite. I associate haunted houses with tragedy or rage - spite is such a small, mean emotion but still one that can poison everything about a person (or a house) and that's such an excellent premise for a horror story. Those two chapters are the best thing in the book and come the closest to actually being an effective horror story, but they come at about the 80% mark and aren't enough to justify what came before. And then they're over, and we still have to finish the book, which fails to bring all its threads together into anything satisfying.
Plus the author is really bad about telling-not-showing. So much telling me that a character was having an emotion instead of demonstrating it! So frustrating.
Now I'm going to have to go find myself a better horror novel to wash the boring out of my brain.
no subject
no subject