I love a goofy joke like this, but the placement was jarring. When we get our first encounter with ghost bride, meant to inspire horror (I think?) we get a long description of how neurons respond in the brain followed by a hacky joke that relies on rearranging where the word “fucking” stands in the sentence. It is an ironic reflex, one in which the author is unable to escape, more preoccupied with slapping similes on each character’s reaction than cultivating vulnerability, the slow drip of horror that the best authors of the genre do so well, or, you know, plot. Instead, there is petty arguing, emotionally distanced mocking of the characters by the author, and occasional insertions of ghosts whenever the author remembered what genre she was supposedly writing for.Ĭharacters accuse other characters of acting like a protagonist, they casually discuss the tropes of a ghost story, and at one point the writer actually mentions that: “(r)ead a hundred books on horror, and you’ll find that every last one possesses at least one mention of someone’s eyes gone strange, unfocused and unsettling to witness.” It is not clever, not thought-provoking, not grounding us in the scene. The fear comes not in the eventual breaking of it but in the meticulous build-up. True horror requires-as far as I can tell-a building of tension, a careful construction of suspense even if we think we know where it is going. That, it turns out, is the crux of the novel, their feisty little exchanges going from humorous to exhausting about ten pages in. This group of young adults have all either slept with each other, dated, or at the very least kindled some sexual tension. We start with a promising premise: a group of twentysomethings stay in a haunted mansion, one tethered to a classic ghost tale, almost wanting to provoke a ghost encounter to get their money’s worth. Being clever is easy-there is nothing behind it, no emotion, no greater truths, no human connection-it is simply a brief blip of intellectual flexing of the bicep or showing off your tanned midriff, and then moving onto the next thing:
But she decided to not even try and instead focus on showing off how clever she is. Horror novels are hard-using words to conjure images to creep you out as you sit on your hammock outside in the sun.
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