One Good Book Deserves Another

Genre: Horror
Series: N/A
Rating: 5 Stars
Length: 447 Pages
Formats: Paperback, Kindle


Once upon a time...there was a little girl named Lisa. She was twelve years old. Lisa had a brother named Sam and she loved him very much, even though he was ten and sometimes very annoying. Lisa also had a cousin named Evie who she loved very much, and though Evie was a year older, her cousin wasn't very popular, so Lisa made sure that Evie was included whenever she came to visit, even when she had to protect her from bullies.

That summer, the three were inseparable as they delved into the woods behind Lisa and Sam's house, traipsing around together, whispering and playing and being children, with all of a child's bravado and imagination and fancy. And then one day they trekked into the woods to visit for maybe the thousandth time the mysterious town of Reliance, a place that is spoken of in whispers and with superstition, a story told of townspeople, over forty of them, disappearing without a trace between one day and the next, leaving full plates of food, cows in need of milking, and horses stabled. Reliance, it is whispered, is haunted, or it is a doorway to another world, or it is a dangerous place where children and animals disappear. On that day, it was the place Lisa heard bells and saw fairies. And believed.

Weeks later; many sultry summer days of youth and innocence later...Lisa went into Reliance alone, and vanished.

Fifteen years gone, a woman named Phoebe was home when she got a phone call, the voice on the other end girlish and faint and tinged with fear. That voice whispered to Phoebe, telling her to tell Sammy where to look to find something long missing, where to find the Book of Fairies. Sam was her boyfriend. Fifteen years ago, he'd been ten. With a sister named Lisa.

Since finding the book, Phoebe and Sam's life starts spiraling out of control, with unexplained events and threatening incidents increasing in frequency and intensity, as if gaining momentum towards some horrifying conclusion that neither can comprehend. When they find the letter, though, those few brief lines written in handwriting familiar to Sam, they realize that life as they knew it was over and the future is a dark, fearsome place.

Lisa was back from Fairy. And she'd see them soon.

Between the present and the past, Don't Breathe a Word sinks deeper and deeper into mystery and fantasy, into the blind optimism of youth and the cautionary intensity of adulthood, blurring, ever blurring the line between reality and fiction, darkness and light, dream and nightmare. Like the best horror stories, for that is truly what this book is, a decadent horror sweetened by unanswered questions and grim supposition, acrid with deception and lies, the events of the story of Phoebe in the present and Lisa in the past are deftly woven into a haunting epic that is virtually impossible to look away from. Even when you want to look away so very badly, when the fear of revealed truth is like a garrote against your throat.

Painted in lush strokes of familiar moments, the past events are colored brightly with the enthusiasm and joy of childhood, those unfettered days when reality didn't seem quite so close, quite so immutable. Seeing the lives of Lisa, Evie, and Sam spread out as they live that summer was haunting and brilliant and tragic. It was easily a summer from my own youth, facts slightly changed but so easy to relate to on an elemental level. And McMahon was deft and devious in her style, slowly aging the photo, quietly uncovering the worm in the apple as the past and present move ever closer towards collision.

Phoebe was the focal point of the present, a flawed but nurturing woman of questionable background but big heart. Her own past connected in confusing and dark ways to those things that move in shadow and crawl out from under the bed at night to terrify you. Her very presence kept the line between the real world and the world of Fairy blurry and indistinct, as Sam was the pragmatist in all of it, and always had been. Their lives, their present and the events unfolding before them, were perhaps less haunting for the uncertainty of their future, but tense and taut because of a far more corporeal threat, and tragic for their past.

This is not a book I can say I loved. It's too disturbing, the revelations and truth too bitter after slowly being peeled away from a rotted core. I loved how it was told, though. I loved that it made me feel, that I was right there, fully invested in the story once it all started to unfold. I appreciate the book, I suppose you could say, even as I wish for a different ending, even as parts of me are unsatisfied with how it all worked out.

That's not on the book, though. That's not the book's fault. It did exactly what it was intended to do. And it did it with creepy, confusing, horrifying aplomb. Not all fairy tales have a happy ending, you see. And some nightmares are real. And sometimes, just sometimes, the combination of both and the absence of nothing leaves you with more questions, more concerns, and a ragged truth that breaks your heart and offers no comfort, even if you don't believe it. Even if you don't know what to believe.

Are you one of the chosen? 

Disclosure: This book was received for free through Goodreads.com First Reads for the purpose of an honest rating. All ratings, comments, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this review are my own.

Genre: Horror, Young Adult
Series: Dreamhouse Kings, Book 1
Rating: 3 Stars
Length: 304 Pages, 1910 Locations
Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, Kindle


Fifteen-year-old Xander King wasn't at all happy to move from his home and friends in L.A. to a nowhere town in northern California. He felt like he was being exiled and made his displeasure well known to his parents. It didn't alter the fact that he found himself, along with his twelve-year-old brother David and nine-year-old sister Toria, shuffled off to Pinedale looking at houses with their parents. Until one morning, when one of the houses seemed to look back.

Xander felt the wrongness of the house...where sounds come from odd places and his family isn't always where they are supposed to be, but before he can formulate an objection, his father has purchased the house and they are moving in. Not even the history of the house, where thirty years previous a mother was ripped away from her family and the remaining family disappeared without a trace, dissuaded the Kings from the relocation.

As Xander and his brother explore the house and mysterious occurrences keep piling up, the house takes on a darker aspect and the danger increases, but ultimately it is a family secret that puts every one of the Kings at serious risk.

Creepy and atmospheric, Robert Liparulo kicks off this young adult horror/adventure series with gusto, blending a smooth narrative with a gift for story that is often genuinely disturbing and - admittedly - scary. Xander is a sympathetic young hero and his relationship with his brother David is one of the high points of the book. They are realistic in their curiosity and often casual disregard for danger, and the adolescent honesty of emotional expression was also very well represented.

Unfortunately, there were a few things that seriously impacted my enjoyment of the book. The Dreamhouse Kings Series seems to be, and this is strictly based on the first book, less episodic and more series-centric. In other words, House of Dark Shadows isn't a self-contained book with its own completed plot arc. Rather it seems to be the first chapter of the arc of the entire series, and as such it introduces you to the characters and conflict, but doesn't resolve anything. In fact, events just preceding the end lean me towards considering it a cliffhanger ending. It's not badly done, and the book ends at a point that felt natural instead of abrupt, but I loathe cliffhangers and I don't like many series-centric series. It's a style that just doesn't appeal to me (with one or two notable exceptions).

The other thing that bothered me is more plot-related than style-related. While I do believe the story to be scary and the characters likable, their actions left a lot to be desired. I expect a bit of dunderhead behavior from kids, but even with that, there were several times when the actions of Xander and David were on par with those of B-grade horror movie victims for their apparent lack self preservation. And I felt the entire premise and every action of their father's was unconscionable, unthinkable, and lacking in common sense. Towards the end I just wanted to smack him. Hard. Repeatedly.

I also felt that there weren't many surprises in the plot (the "big reveal" was neither big nor revealing when it happened), the pacing dragged a bit at the beginning and again in the middle, and there was an unexplained disparity between Xander's original reaction to the house and his latter curiosity for it. The lack of resolution, the cliffhanger, and the questionable character actions, though, were what really put me off.

I think that the series will have a wonderful following and even with the issues I had, I'll admit...it's the first book I've read in a very, very long time that creeped me out that much. The opening prologue was gut wrenching and powerful and there were others that were hair raising. That being said, and strictly because my preferences lie elsewhere, I just don't think that this series is for me.

Genre: Horror
Series: N/A
Rating: 2.5 Stars
Formats: Paperback, Kindle


Eighty years ago, a young servant girl named Beatrice was impaled on a pitchfork in her small servant's quarters in the basement of the house of one of the richest families in Maine. Since that horrific murder, the Young family has suffered tenfold, cursed to gather once every decade and through a lottery, submit one family member to spend what will be the last night of their lives in that same room. Fail to hold the lottery, and instead of one death, the family faces slaughter. That has been proven to horrific fact. Hiding or running results in the same brutal end game. For years the patriarch of the family, Howard Young, has gone unchosen in the lottery, and for eight decades he's watched brothers, uncles, sons, nephews, cousins...all fall under this horrific curse. He's hired expert after expert in an attempt to break it, work around it...anything, but to no avail. At ninety-eight years old, he realizes that this year will almost assuredly be his last as the head of what's left of his family, and so he tries again. He hires a very special investigator with ties to the FBI and with some experience with the paranormal. Maybe this time...maybe this year...maybe...

Former FBI agent Carolyn Cartwright has her own ghosts to deal with. She survived a relationship with a deadly conman and hasn't quite gotten her confidence back from that experience. Not only that, but she's financially responsible for a sister with developmental disabilities and her mother's premature death after a long illness decimated her finances. The one million dollar paycheck from Harry Young is desperately needed, even if the house she's been invited to gives her the creeps and Mr. Young himself is stubbornly sparse with the details of her hiring. Carolyn is very good at investigation, though, and as more and more of the past comes to light and the true nature of the danger this family faces becomes very personal to Carolyn, the race becomes frantic to stop an eighty year old ghost from finishing what was started so long ago - the annihilation of an entire family.

I love a good ghost story, and I have to admit, Manning has all the building blocks of a truly creepy and horrific ghost story, full of mysterious apparitions, vague and not so vague threats, and the requisite reprehensible character or three that you want to suffer heinously before they die screaming. I thought the concept behind the haunting was imaginative...disturbing, but imaginative...and several aspects of the plot were legitimately spine tingling. I also have to give credit to Manning for being able to maintain a growing level of anxiety as the deadline for the lottery gets closer and closer, and Carolyn's character becomes more and more invested in the outcome. It kept me reading, even though I'd figured out quite a bit of the big picture before she did. I don't hold that against Manning - that's pretty common in horror and suspense novels and I don't actually think Manning was trying very hard to hide it, if he was at all.

What I did have a problem with wasn't the story and how it developed so much as how it was written. While the creativity and imagination of the plot were solid enough to provide a strong ghost story, ultimately it was the execution that turned potential screams of terror into slightly disgruntled frowns. Most notably, the timelines for character backstory and development were riddled with contradictions, and those that weren't in direct conflict were highly improbable. Never was this more egregious than in the exposition of Carolyn's past and her motivations for her present. She's also described as a crack investigator, yet most of the information she obtains comes from supposition and questionable leaps in logic, not actual investigation and despite her repeatedly claiming to keep an open mind in the absence of factual data. The groundwork for the whole of the book was shaky because of that and it never quite solidified for me as a reader.

The narrative suffers from a lack of sophistication, grammatical errors and awkwardness making it seem quite stilted and unnatural, and the dialogue between characters didn't always feel organic. In more than one instance I found the characters' actions and purported feelings - most notably for Carolyn and Douglas - were inexplicable and perplexing, and developed without any foundation. There were just too many problems like that and of a similar nature to keep me invested in the story, and towards the end, those problems morphed into absurd happenstance that totally ruined my ability to maintain a willing suspension of disbelief. Between the sparsely defined and almost painfully executed romance and the appearance of a character that was given no cause to be included, let alone an inkling of why he is in the condition he's in, the ending really started to fall apart for me. The Killing Room went from being a tragic, though flawed, ghost story with some legitimate sense of menace to being a D-grade slasher flick full of selfish, reprehensible characters and more concerned with shock value than good storytelling.

I see potential in Manning. He's got imagination...dark and disturbing as that imagination is...and he has an ability to draw a reader along to varying degrees even when the story is flawed. His writing chops aren't anywhere near King and Koontz yet, though, and attempting to compare is precipitous, but he could definitely scare the bejesus out of me if I was reading his stuff in a dark, deserted house. That's gotta count for something.