Reviews - The Nice House on the Lake Vol. 1

806 reviews for:

The Nice House on the Lake Vol. 1

James Tynion IV

4.29 AVERAGE

nono_cmbmrl's review

4.0

adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

helenamarijke's review

4.5

adventurous dark mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: N/A

Loveable characters: N/A

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

wolvesfromsaturn's review against another edition

4.5

emotional mysterious reflective tense

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

philipf's review

5.0

challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

kay_west_reads's review

5.0

A great dystopian world building story. The art is a little too loose, so it's hard to tell the characters apart, but the writing is great and the plot is paced well, so I still loved it.

crloken's review

4.0

Nothing will ever convince me that James Tynion IV wasn't a huge fan of LOST. Where The Woods was LOST on a strange planet, this is LOST at the end of the World.

A group of 30-somethings are all invited for a weekend at a nice house on a lake by an old friend. They don't all know each other, don't all like each other, and didn't even know who was coming, but they decided to anyway. The house is ridiculously nice, with its own gym and movie theatre, but shortly after they arrive the other shoe dropped; the world is over. It ended in fire, people's skin peeling off from the heat. The Nice House is all that's left, and they were carefully selected to be the last survivors.

As far as descendents of LOST go, this is brilliant. Tynian has made the wide choice to only include about a dozen people so there isn't a group of extras we don't care about hanging around (a problem both LOST and The Woods had) and he has used those 10 people to write a personal, aching kind of existential horror. A story in which the characters are helpless to do anything but live in a staid version of supposed happiness, all while the rest of the world melts.

There aren't many answers and if he's wise there will never be too many answers, because the true horror of life that this captures is the uncertainty and confusion. The feeling that something awful is coming combined with the helplessness of not being able to always even remember it, not to mention stop it.

What James Tynion IV and I have in common is that I also love LOST (ending and all). I'm excited to see what comes next.