this reads like the baby sister of haunting of hill house without the siblings and the depth i'm sorry



READ FOR: gothic haunted house story or basically if you want something like haunting of hill house on netflix

— overall thoughts: 3.0 —
⇢ content warnings//

Spoiler

Cancer (mentioned), Child death, Murder, Parent death (past), Pedophilia (speculated), Snakes, Suicide, Terminal illness

the twists drove me a lil crazy at the end and my theories were completely off so brownie points for that. That was the main reason I didn't end up giving this 2 stars. Also considering that there were certain parts that made me want to vomit imagining and that I was sort of creeped out by but not really.

“Few things in life are more disappointing than knowing your parents aren’t being honest with you.”

The parallelism of the two narrators in the story were interesting to me since we do get to figure out what really happened from the perspective of the dad, but I wished that there would be something different other than just the same thing feeling like it was being acted out.

From the beginning up to around 70% of this book (when the 5 plot twists started coming in) I was barely interested. It just really sounded like a rip-off of hill house to me with the amount of similarities:

- child being left the house by a parent who died
- parent wrote a book about haunter house experience
- said child being hounded by news reporters
- said child trying to find out what actually happened because they can't trust their own memories
-

Spoiler

the fact that none of the ghosts were real and just people being weird and wanting to kill people. hill house had a better plot twist than this.

-

Spoiler

everything about the plot twists but remove all supernatural elements, unlike what hill house did

...but without the emotional attachment.

With that said, the characters felt flat to me and just didn't care about them. I love a good "haunted house" and "who done it" story (definitely my favorite kind to read) so that was probably why I was able to pull through but I feel like it relied so much on people just enjoying that aspect that the rest of the plot did not do it for me.

I prefer to be engaged, excited, and addicted with my thrillers.

I was almost up to 2.0x speed but I still thought that the good part was a long time coming.

In conclusion, I have mixed feelings but it's not a... "bad" book...? I just think that it's wholly unoriginal and not as exciting as I built up in my head.

I do think that if you're not someone who likes going into hardcore horror or too intense thrillers you might enjoy this since as I said, it's not that scary. Which makes it accessible. I haven't read any of Riley Sager's other books and I'm willing to give him a second chance.

// buddy read with Mina and Michelle

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