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octavia_cade 's review for:
House of Blood and Teeth
by Maxwell Bauman
dark
sad
tense
fast-paced
The Ingram family moves to a new town in an attempt to start again after their oldest child dies in an accident, and the effort's all for nothing as their new house is haunted. Increasingly, the family begins to believe that it's haunted by the ghost of their dead son/brother, which makes little sense to me as the ghost is clearly and viciously malevolent and the dead kid was very much not, but they're all so gullible (or, if you're more charitable, so grief-stricken) that they go along with it anyway. It doesn't end well.
There's some effectively creepy imagery here, but I think what doesn't really work for me is the pace. This is a novella and so there's a limited word count to work with, but things degenerate very quickly... so quickly that I didn't find a lot of it all that convincing. Yes, Justin's death has left his surviving family vulnerable, but I found their collective descent into lunacy to be far too accelerated.
There's some effectively creepy imagery here, but I think what doesn't really work for me is the pace. This is a novella and so there's a limited word count to work with, but things degenerate very quickly... so quickly that I didn't find a lot of it all that convincing. Yes, Justin's death has left his surviving family vulnerable, but I found their collective descent into lunacy to be far too accelerated.