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Customer Review
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 February 2024
Helen, a burned-out A&E doctor and her husband, unemployed journalist George, move from London to a remote fixer-upper in Cornwall that is supposed to be their dream home. But something about the place feels wrong from day one and Helen has the creepy feeling she’s seen this house before. Her unease only deepens after renovations begin, when the builders find sinister dolls hidden in the walls and when she digs into the house’s past, she discovers that the previous owner was not only rumoured to be a witch; she was also imprisoned for a brutal triple murder thirty years earlier.
I really enjoyed McGowan’s “Are You Awake” last year and love a good horror, so was really looking forward to this but found it, overall, disappointing. The characters are a bit bland and unbelievable (Helen was perfectly happy to let her sloppy husband arrange a new house and the move without having ANY idea where they were going?) and George, for one, really started to get on my nerves. The house location is well used and atmospheric, but there’s no real sense of Cornwall (it could have been anywhere remote, really) and the supernatural elements are quickly quashed, unfortunately. My biggest issue was that there are three points of view, which means a lot of repetition - so much so, I ended up skipping bigger and bigger chunks as the story progressed. The actual story itself is a tightly plotted thriller that would have better suited a novella, but the padding to make it a novel is quite obvious.
I really enjoyed McGowan’s “Are You Awake” last year and love a good horror, so was really looking forward to this but found it, overall, disappointing. The characters are a bit bland and unbelievable (Helen was perfectly happy to let her sloppy husband arrange a new house and the move without having ANY idea where they were going?) and George, for one, really started to get on my nerves. The house location is well used and atmospheric, but there’s no real sense of Cornwall (it could have been anywhere remote, really) and the supernatural elements are quickly quashed, unfortunately. My biggest issue was that there are three points of view, which means a lot of repetition - so much so, I ended up skipping bigger and bigger chunks as the story progressed. The actual story itself is a tightly plotted thriller that would have better suited a novella, but the padding to make it a novel is quite obvious.
