"If there was one thing recent history had taught him, it was that fears came true far more often than dreams."

Overall, I enjoyed this. 


I didn't love how it was written. There were lots of short sentence fragments set apart as sentences, and while that works when the tension is high, it didn't work well throughout. 

I'm still not sure how I feel about how many different POVs there were. The book was a bit short to support them all and it felt weird in a haunted house novel. They weren't done badly, but I didn't love them. I feel like it might have increased the tension to just have one or two (the people actually living in the house) so we didn't have so much background information or the information had to be fed to the characters while it was fed to us. It would have been a bit scarier. They were also very short chapters, which made it harder to get immersed. 

It was a creepy house, though, and that's what I want in my haunted house stories. The characters were good and the mystery of what caused Eric and his family to end up in a situation where this is their last, best hope was intriguing enough it dragged me comfortably along until the house got weird. 

I don't love the ending. I don't hate it, but I don't love it. That's about as much as I can say without spoilers. 

I enjoyed this, though I didn't love it.

It's a very personal and philosophical look at the subject, so it was a rough read at some points. The author is HONEST about what he was going through, and that includes both his suicide attempts (in equisite detail in some places) and his alcoholism. Reader beware if you're not in a good place when picking this up. There's a full chapter he states outright that if you are not in a good place to skip. 

I liked the philosophical bits and all the quotes/explanations of what other authors had said on the subject. I hadn't realized how much writing there was on suicide until I read this. 

This was a lot more boring than I was expecting. I enjoy what I shelve as "weird shit"--stuff like this, where they are basically historical conspiracy theories. But this involved a lot more specific math and general details (how a diving suit works in horrific detail, for instance) than a lot of other books like this I read (including other Hancock stuff I've read) and I was just a bit bored throughout.