It took me five years between buying this book to finish reading the series and actually reading it, but that’s okay. I think I appreciate it far more now than I would have then. Kind of Weetzie Bat meets American Gods, with lush diction and an inclusive cast of characters. Tally is insufferable, which I liked, because I was insufferable in similar ways when I was 18.

I loved the setup for The Atrocities—a governess is hired to teach a ghost who might or might not be real—as much as I loved the atmosphere of a big Gothic mansion filled with grotesque art. There’s even a hedge maze; who doesn’t love a scary hedge maze? But I feel that it suffers from being a novella, and would have been much better with more space to flesh out the characters’ identities and relationships with each other. In the end, I was left with no real sense of who these people are or what motivates them... and with an ending like this one, I really needed to know their motivations.

I’m tempted to round up for potential, but then I remember that this book also uses my least favorite horror trope—you thought it was supernatural, but it’s not!—and decide that two stars are enough.