First off, let me say I loved this story. But, let's just get it out of the way now, this book will not be for everyone. It is very weird and sort of hard to talk about without going into specific details. But based on the reviews I've read, people either really love it or are sort of meh about it. I fall on the love it side of the argument. This is a novella following two 17-year olds who, on their first date, discover a house at the bottom of a lake. The rest of the story is mostly them exploring the house and exploring their feelings for each other. I'm not very well read in this sort of weird/speculative/magic realism type of genre so I'm not sure what the best way to describe this book is. I was trying to explain it to my non-reader boyfriend and said it was very similar levels and types of weird to the Pan's Labyrinth movie (which he's seen). After having some more time to think and reflect, I've settled on that comparison as the best I can think of. This house is based in reality - the characters are literally canoeing across a lake and literally get scuba gear to go down and explore - but there's an otherworldly element and feeling once they're inside the house.
My absolute favorite part of this book is the tone and horror elements. I've seen some reviews questioning why anyone would consider this book horror and while there aren't any graphic scenes or much of a direct threat to the characters' well-being but I don't think those are the only things that can count as horror. I would say maybe 'unsettling' or 'eerie' would be a better description for the tone, but I entirely disagree with the people saying this isn't horror in the slightest. There were scenes that made me feel scared, claustrophobic, and even a little panicky. But these scenes were balanced well with much more light scenes of the two characters just relaxing on the lake, soaking up some sun. One of the taglines for this book is "just because a house is empty, doesn’t mean nobody’s home" and I think this really sets the tone for the book. In the same vein, my favorite line of the book is something along the lines of: 'they wouldn't ask how or why, but they never thought about asking who'. In my opinion, this isn't the type of book to really cause nightmares, but it is one that will put you on edge enough to maybe double check that the doors are locked or think twice about hearing that creak in the house.
I was a little icked out by the fact that we get some fairly explicit intimacy scenes between the two characters who are only 17. They weren't long or drawn out, but they were explicit enough that I was a little uncomfortable. And this is coming from someone who reads a ton of romance books with a ton of explicit sex scenes. It didn't bother me enough to knock it down in rating or tarnish my overall feelings about the book, but I do know some people feel differently about this than I do so I just wanted to throw it out there.
I really enjoyed how many scenes we got of these two characters exploring the house. I was a bit afraid going into the book that they might only go in the house a handful of times and then spend the rest of the book just talking about the house. But I'd say the majority of the middle of the book was spent underwater which was by far my favorite part of the book. I think the descriptions were really well done and I could clearly picture where the characters were going while they were in the house. It was really helpful that, when they were taking turns exploring, one character would start where the other left off so we didn't get an overload of repetition of the first initial rooms which I think would have made the narrative drag on. Instead, every time they were exploring the house, they found a new area to explore and the reader was exploring right along side of them.
The final note I want to mention about this book is something that might just be a 'me-thing' and I'm not sure if it is a necessarily a pro or con, but this book feels like something that I would have read in an English Lit class. It has that literary fiction feeling but with enough of those 'other' elements (magical realism or whatever you want to call it) that it feels like it would lead to some really interesting class discussions. The ending is also pretty open to interpretation which, again, would be open to some interesting discussions. I'll fully admit that I'm not really a big reader of contemporary or literary fiction books. I'm much more of a genre-heavy reader (romance, thrillers, occasional sci-fi, etc) and while this book did have those genre elements, I felt it had a much more literary/contemporary lean than what the synopsis led me to believe. I'm also not sure if I think that all contemporary/literary sounding books would come across like books to be read in school, but I definitely thought that about this one. I really only got this feeling in the beginning and ending 15%s of the book, the middle was much more heavy into those genre elements and I was very invested in the exploration of the house.
Overall, a really weird/speculative/magic realism type of story with some nice unsettling and eerie moments sprinkled in. Feels like the kind of book you need to have a discussion with other people about and maybe read a few times to get everything out of it. It isn't for everyone, but I really liked it in the end.
115 pages
Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine for the ARC.
Originally published: October 31st 2016 by This Is Horror.
New publishing date: January 19, 2021 by Random House.
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