Book Review — The House of Salt and Sorrows

 

Title: The House of Salt and Sorrow
Author: Erin A. Craig
Genre: YA Fairy Tale Retelling
Pages: Hardback 400
ISBN: 978-109848-3192-7
Opening Lines: "Candlelight reflected off the silver anchor etched onto my sister's necklace. It was an ugly piece of jewelry and something Eulalie would never have picked out for herself."

Rating

"Annaleigh lives a sheltered life at Highmoor, a manor by the sea, with her sisters and their father and stepmother. Once there were twelve, but the loneliness fills the grand halls now that four of the girls' lives have been cut short. Each death was more tragic than the last—the plague, a plummeting fall, a drowning, a slippery plunge—and there are whispers throughout the surrounding villages that the family is curses by the gods.

"Disturbed by a series of ghostly visions, Annaleigh becomes increasingly suspicious that her sister's deaths were no accidents. The girls have been sneaking out every night to attend glittering balls, dancing until dawn in silk gowns and shimmering slippers, and Annaleigh isn't sure whether to try to stop them or to join their forbidden trysts. Because who—or what—are they really dancing with?

"When Annaleigh's involvement with a mysterious stranger who has secrets of his own intensifies, it's a race to unravel the darkness that has fallen over her family—before it claims her next."

~ Jacket copy

In the small seaside city, a "curse" plagues the house of Thaumas—taking the wife and daughters of a lord by the sea. While all of the deaths seems to either be from natural causes such as disease or tragic accident, both the people in the surrounding villages and those on the mainland question whether the lord and his previous wife suffer from a curse. Did he anger a god? Did he anger his patron god, Pontus? Each remaining girl—while extremely beautiful—becomes ineligible on the marriage market due to the rumors. Damned to become spinsters, the girls discover a mysterious door in the family's crypt, which leads to lands where their curse is unknown. And each night, the girls escape the manor house and dance all night long. However, despite the joy of being beautiful—and anonymous—bachelorettes, Annaleigh starts to question her sisters' deaths. When she starts to see the ghosts of her sisters and strange things happen around the manor, she also questions her sanity. In a small town by the seas, audiences meet the new Twelve Dancing Princesses.

Book Review — No One Gets Out Alive

Title:  No One Gets Out Alive
Author:  Adam Nevill
Genre:  Horror
Pages:  Paperback, 628
ISBN:  978-1-4472-4090-7
Opening Lines: "The dream receded quickly and Stephanie recalled little of it, beside an anxious desire to leave a cold, greyish place; a narrow space in which people stood too close to her.  One of them had been crying."

Rating

"Cash-strapped, working for temping agencies and living in a shared accommodation, Stephanie Booth feels she can fall no further. So when she takes a new room at the right price, she believes her luck has finally turned. But 82 Edgehill Road is not what it appears to be.

"It's not only the eerie atmosphere of the vast, neglected house, or the disturbing attitude of her new landlord, Knacker McGuire, that makes her uneasy — it's the whispers behind the fireplace, the scratching beneath the floors, the footsteps in the dark, and the young women weeping in neighbouring rooms. When Knacker's menacing cousin, Fergal arrives, the danger exceeds her darkest imaginings.

"But this is merely a beginning, a gateway to horrors beyond Stephanie's worst nightmares. And in a house where no one listens to the screams, will she ever get out alive?

~ Jacket copy

After a bad break-up and a crummy home life, all Stephanie wants to do is make it one her own.  Unfortunately, working in work temp agencies affords her little more than the "Cage"; however, she has to get out.  She cannot live there another day.  As luck would have it, she sees an advert for a boarding house for girls at a price she cannot refuse.  Unfortunately, she refuses to listen to her better reason, over look all of the warning signs, and takes the room for the decent price.  And that's when everything starts happening

I wanted to like this book.  I desperately wanted to like this book!  Many of the reviews said to hang through the first 200 pages, and then it would pick up.  If you can get over Stephanie refusing to stand up for herself and her whining, it would get better.  At times, I honestly believed the reviews.  Yes, the first 200 pages are hard to slog through; however, Nevill has some great world/setting building in those pages.  He sets an amazing tone and mood that carried the book through.  Unfortunately, it should have ended after the ninth day in the house.

The book has a very good undercurrent of the paranormal, and, at times, it invaded my dreams.  I found myself a bit paranoid after reading the book.  Sadly, Stephanie is not a likable character, and she is rather daft.  Without getting into the aspect of the Black Maggie, Knacker's plans were obvious.  Even the idea of the Black Maggie was overused and played out.

After reading House of Small Shadows and reading rave reviews of Nevill's other books, I desperately wanted to venture into his other works.  If his other books are like this, I will be staying away from him in the future.  He suffers from TELLING and not showing.  Much of the last third of the book was spent skimming and skipping large sections.  It was more erroneous and superfluous detail that completely took me out of the story.  As mentioned before, the entire last part of the book was completely unnecessary, and the story itself would have been improved had it been scrapped during editing.

All in all, this book ended up being more of a disappointment. 

 

Book #1 of 2011

1. Title: Ghost Story
Author: Peter Straub
Genre: Horror
Pages: 567
Opening: "What was the worst thing you've ever done?
I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me . . . the most dreadful thing . . ."

"For four aging men in the terror-stricken town of Milburn, New York, an act inadvertently carried out in their youth has come back to haunt them. Now they are about to learn what happens to those you believe they can bury the past -- and get away with murder." ~Jacket copy

Thoughts: Reading all of the reviews about this book online make it clear that it is frightening. Many people said that they couldn't sleep at night while they were reading this book. Even my brother told me not to read it at night. However, for me, it started out fairly slowly. I found myself wondering when it was going to finally pick up. The promise of something happening kept me reading the book. I will admit that the writing wasn't drab or daunting.

It feels as though the author is trying to give the reader an impression of the town, the people, and the relationship these four men have with their community. In that way, Straub sets the stage very well. The growing creep factor seems to start after Sears' first story of Fenny and Gregory. However, like King following in his footsteps, Straub uses the slight, uneasy changes occurring within the community to feed the story.

While the story was very engaging, it took nearly half of the book for the creep factor to set in for me. However, about 150 pages from the end of the novel, I was finding myself hearing weird sounds in the house, strange noises outside in the wind, etc., and that added to the feeling of the book. I felt as though I was in the story with the characters and experiencing the same things. All in all, this book was good and engaging. I found myself tearing through the book because I wanted to know what was going to happen next! I would suggest not reading this book alone or in the dark if you're prone to an overactive imagination!

Rating: 4/5
Horror/Urban Fantasy Reading Challenge: 1/24

Currently: The Watchers by Dean Koontz

Quote

"The following events occurred a year and a day earlier, in the evening of the last day of the golden age. None of them knew it was their golden age, nor that is was coming to an end: in fact they would have seen their lives, in the usual fashion of people with comfortable existences, sufficiently of friends and the certainty of food on the table, as a process of gradual and even imperceptible improvement. Having survived the crises of youth and the middle years, they thought they had wisdom enough to meet the coming crises of age; having seen wars, adulteries, compromise and change, they thought they had seen most everything they would see -- they'd make no larger claims.

"Yet there were things they had not seen, and which they would see in time.

"It is always true in personal, if not historical, terms that a golden age's defining characteristic is its dailiness, its offered succession of the small satisfactions of daily living. If none in the Chowder Society but Ricky Hawthrone truly appreciated this, in time they would all know it."

~Ghost Story by Peter Straub, page 128-129