I was expecting a lot more out of this.

 

I trod through the first part, hopelessly bored and not really liking the narrator much (she was crazy clingy with the children and very old-school-gothic-heroine, and I do not like those types) in the hopes that it would get creepy. I wanted it to be creepy. I wanted chills down my spine and to be left with a sense of horror when the ending came.

 

I was not. Some of this might simply have been that my expectations were way too high. I normally try not to let that affect me, but it may very well have with this novel. I had heard such wonderful things about it, that it was a classic and that it was eerie and that it left you, in the end, with questions about the sanity of several people.

 

I didn't feel like the sanity was really in question, honestly. There were no real questions for me, and while the ending did leave me with a vague sense of horror, it was not of the type one generally wishes to be engendered by a horror story. It was horror of a different sort, almost everyday horror, and that was not what I signed up for.

 

Perhaps I missed something. Perhaps my hopes were too high and there was no way it could meet them, or perhaps I'm missing subtleties in the text, but I felt like this is vastly overrated as a horror story and I did not, in the end, like it very much.