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3.38 AVERAGE
3.38 AVERAGE
The protagonist of this novel is not easy to like. Sarah is a psychologist who wrote a bestselling book and is a media influencer. She thought that by buying what is known as the murder house and renovating it, she’d increase her following, but instead, she mired her and her husband in massive debt. None of the small-town neighbors accept her because they want that house and its evil past bulldozed. Is one of the neighbors the one leaving her notes and making those noises at night?
As Sarah’s marriage and career seem to be crumbling, Sarah worries that her secret past will come out and destroy her completely—if she survives that long.
This is a downer book. I liked some parts of the ending, but I wouldn’t describe this as a fun read.
NetGalley provided an advance copy of this novel, which RELEASES SEPTEMBER 26, 2023.
As Sarah’s marriage and career seem to be crumbling, Sarah worries that her secret past will come out and destroy her completely—if she survives that long.
This is a downer book. I liked some parts of the ending, but I wouldn’t describe this as a fun read.
NetGalley provided an advance copy of this novel, which RELEASES SEPTEMBER 26, 2023.
3.5 stars, rounded up
This one started very strong, and it one of few books that made me feel like someone was actually creeping up behind me at the start.
As it progresses, it does fizzle out a bit, but the ending is relatively strong, and the author’s note at the end about her own struggle was brave and encouraging.
All in, I would recommend this one.
This one started very strong, and it one of few books that made me feel like someone was actually creeping up behind me at the start.
As it progresses, it does fizzle out a bit, but the ending is relatively strong, and the author’s note at the end about her own struggle was brave and encouraging.
All in, I would recommend this one.
Sarah, a social media influencer and her bartender husband buy a spooky murder house to renovate.
Sarah starts noticing strange things happening. She’s hearing footsteps up in the attic, someone is leaving her notes about things only she would know about. She quickly becomes a psychological disaster. As her pathological fears grow they bring out redundant flashbacks and secrets from her past.
The heart pounding sinister vibes had me spooked and curious to figure out the who, what, how’s going on. I do love some creepy gothic and sinister vibes that this amazing book provides.
Thank you so much Bantam via Netgalley for the ARC!
Sarah starts noticing strange things happening. She’s hearing footsteps up in the attic, someone is leaving her notes about things only she would know about. She quickly becomes a psychological disaster. As her pathological fears grow they bring out redundant flashbacks and secrets from her past.
The heart pounding sinister vibes had me spooked and curious to figure out the who, what, how’s going on. I do love some creepy gothic and sinister vibes that this amazing book provides.
Thank you so much Bantam via Netgalley for the ARC!
“Give me validation. Give me praise. I’m empty. Fill me up.”
Thank you to NetGalley, Bantam, and Lisa Marlin for an eARC of The Stranger Upstairs!
As we enter into the spooky season, my reading taste is turning more towards thrillers and mysteries. This book is the perfect combination of both and kept me on my toes the entire time. Just when. I thought I knew what was happening a twist would get thrown in and I had to re-asses my theory. I love books like this. I read a lot of thrillers, so it takes a lot for a book to keep me on the edge of my seat, but The Stranger Upstairs did.
I enjoyed the characters in this book. I felt very bad for Sarah at the beginning. She seemed like the typical millennial with a nice shiny life on social media, but a much messier one in real life. As we get to know her character more, we begin to see her true self emerge. But things don’t just unravel, everything keeps going and we see her reach rock bottom. We don’t know what it is from. Guilt? Are her neighbors trying to drive her insane? Does she have a mental disorder? So many possibilities are hinted at that it makes Sarah’s character hard to read, hard to like, and hard to hate.
Black Wood house is a creepy character on its own and I honestly wish I could go visit it. I had such a vivid picture of this house in my mind that I felt like I was actually there. Often times there were thoughts and sounds attributed to the house. Are these actual thoughts? Is the house haunted or is this all in Sarah’s mind? It was just another element that kept me on my toes.
I also really liked the pacing of this book. Things start off slow, but build up until everything is falling apart at a frantic pace. Towards the ending I felt like I couldn’t end fast enough. As the plot built, I felt the same sense of crazy energy Sarah must have been feeling while she was questioning herself. This didn’t come on suddenly - it was a slow build like the loss of Sarah’s sanity - so I felt the author did a wonderful job creating these complimentary feelings.
I did feel like there were a few unrealistic elements that took a bit away from the plot. The notes and their explanation were one. Some of them made sense while others left me with questions. Also - Sarah works as a therapist and only one other therapist senses anything wrong in the practice? The ending was also pretty outlandish - especially considering the technology we have now, but it is fun to think that it could happen,
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. If you’re looking for a fast paced thriller that will get you in the mood for fall and spooky season, look no further! 3.5 stars rounded up.
Thank you to NetGalley, Bantam, and Lisa Marlin for an eARC of The Stranger Upstairs!
As we enter into the spooky season, my reading taste is turning more towards thrillers and mysteries. This book is the perfect combination of both and kept me on my toes the entire time. Just when. I thought I knew what was happening a twist would get thrown in and I had to re-asses my theory. I love books like this. I read a lot of thrillers, so it takes a lot for a book to keep me on the edge of my seat, but The Stranger Upstairs did.
I enjoyed the characters in this book. I felt very bad for Sarah at the beginning. She seemed like the typical millennial with a nice shiny life on social media, but a much messier one in real life. As we get to know her character more, we begin to see her true self emerge. But things don’t just unravel, everything keeps going and we see her reach rock bottom. We don’t know what it is from. Guilt? Are her neighbors trying to drive her insane? Does she have a mental disorder? So many possibilities are hinted at that it makes Sarah’s character hard to read, hard to like, and hard to hate.
Black Wood house is a creepy character on its own and I honestly wish I could go visit it. I had such a vivid picture of this house in my mind that I felt like I was actually there. Often times there were thoughts and sounds attributed to the house. Are these actual thoughts? Is the house haunted or is this all in Sarah’s mind? It was just another element that kept me on my toes.
I also really liked the pacing of this book. Things start off slow, but build up until everything is falling apart at a frantic pace. Towards the ending I felt like I couldn’t end fast enough. As the plot built, I felt the same sense of crazy energy Sarah must have been feeling while she was questioning herself. This didn’t come on suddenly - it was a slow build like the loss of Sarah’s sanity - so I felt the author did a wonderful job creating these complimentary feelings.
I did feel like there were a few unrealistic elements that took a bit away from the plot. The notes and their explanation were one. Some of them made sense while others left me with questions. Also - Sarah works as a therapist and only one other therapist senses anything wrong in the practice? The ending was also pretty outlandish - especially considering the technology we have now, but it is fun to think that it could happen,
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. If you’re looking for a fast paced thriller that will get you in the mood for fall and spooky season, look no further! 3.5 stars rounded up.
I liked it enough, but it could’ve been better. This is written completely in first person aside from the few interjections we get from the local news. Those parts give hints about what will happen in the future so you can speculate about the ending. There’s only one likable person in this book (a side character), so if the psychological domestic thriller/mystery aspect doesn’t hook you, it might not be that fun. Also, the audiobook was fine, but the narrator sounds kinda silly when she does the floor creaking sound effects, and it’s supposed to be scary. She was convincing as Sarah, though, especially in the highly emotional moments. The reason I’m not rating this lower is because it wasn’t upsetting as I was reading it. This is on the low end of 3 stars for me.
The writing was okay, but it wasn’t a page turner. I think certain phrases were repeated a lot which sometimes took me out of it, but the story was effectively creepy. I did want to know about Sarah’s past and what was happening at the house, so I kept going and guessing. There were a lot of ways this could’ve gone, so the red herrings weren’t bad. I liked the parallels between the MC and the husband who use to live in the house, and I thought the way she identified both with the murderer and the murder victim made sense. I think some of the ending was foreshadowed well, and the twists were decent. The POV character switches at a certain point, and I understood what was happening, but that change was only introduced because the author didn’t know how else to do the reveal. Without spoiling it, I thought the ending wasn’t great because the last chapter and epilogue completely contradict each other. Each one has a different explanation for what’s been happening, and one of them doesn’t feel supported by the rest of the book.
There’s still a couple of loose threads that seemed important but don’t have an explanation by the end. A few things are brought up to add to the mystery and make you think, but they’re dropped and then you don’t know what happened or why they mentioned it. The book wasn’t too long or too short, but I wish those parts were integrated better so things didn’t just happen for no reason/without clarification. I’ll talk about that stuff at the end of this review so you can avoid spoilers.
I’m not sure if it’s intentional or if I came to this conclusion since it was on my mind recently, but there seem to be parallels between the The Yellow Wallpaper and this book. Both stories are about a mentally ill woman who moves into a new, big house and sleeps alone in a room with strange wallpaper. She doesn’t really like it, and as she spends more time looking at it, she starts to notice new details until eventually, she hates it so much she desperately rips it off the walls. This mirrors her psychological breakdown because as she’s slowly becoming increasingly unstable, the wallpaper bothers her more, and she takes out her frustrations on it. There’s also similarities when it comes to feeling watched by the walls and the FMC not being very close to her husband. I like The Yellow Wallpaper way more, and I don’t think they’re the same, but one chapter in the book gave me this idea, so I wanted to mention it in case it was interesting.
The cover is pretty even though the house in the story doesn’t look like that. The author’s note was thoughtful, and I’m happy for Matlin. I hope she’s successful with her future projects. I think she had good ideas about unreliable narrators, social media, and mental health that she played with here, but it didn’t fully stick the landing.
~SPOILERS BELOW~
The daughter who survived forty years ago was never heard from again, so she doesn’t really have a role in this story. The only impact she has involves her yelling “don’t kill me” three times as she ran down the street. Lizzy is haunted by that and imagines hearing it, and then it’s repeated by Emily. It’s too bad we never see what happened to the daughter, but it’s believable enough that she just disappeared and never came back.
The Amanda connection wasn’t fully explained, and maybe that’s on purpose, but I still don’t like it. Why did people mistake Lizzy for Amanda? They weren’t related, and they weren’t the same person. Why was Amanda so similar to Lizzy when they apparently had no connection? The boyfriend wasn’t sure if Amanda was her real name, and that feels similar to how Lizzy copies peoples’ identities and moves around. I thought they were trying to imply Lizzy forgot that she was Amanda, or maybe Amanda was her sister Sarah, but no. And I assume Amanda killed herself on the roof because the house was poisoning her, but why were her hallucinations identical to Lizzy’s? That makes it seem like they were both being played with, but the last chapter doesn’t go into it.
Who was the husband cheating with? This question doesn’t matter as much as the others, but I thought we’d find out who it was and how they met, and it just didn’t come up.
How did the hammer get bloody the first time if Lizzy didn’t kill her husband? It’s implied that’s what she does when she gets angry at him and blacks out, but the only person she murders appears to be Emily. (Of course the one nice character has to die.) Amanda has been dead this whole time, and Joe is still alive by the end, so the scene with Lizzy holding a bloody weapon goes unexplained. I could be forgetting something, or maybe she found the old murder weapon in the attic, but it felt like a loose thread when I started thinking about it.
Most of my questions could be answered by the epilogue ending that reveals the house was evil all along, but I don’t like that, because the carbon monoxide ending made sense on its own. Turning this into a supernatural story when it was grounded and psychological for 99% of it felt random. It felt like everything could have been in Lizzy’s head. She was imagining the house egging her on, and she was forgetting she wrote the notes. Then, Emily goes to the attic with her. Emily didn’t spend a lot of time in the house, so she couldn’t have been having the same visions as a poisoned, hallucinating Lizzy. Her finding the stains on the walls felt like she was working toward a real ending, but all of that was undone by the epilogue saying there were no stains and no one could find the carbon monoxide.
So the house is haunted, and it doesn’t want anyone to be there. It tried to drive Lizzy crazy and tricked Emily into seeing the stains, or it prevented inspectors from finding the gas. When a new family moves in, it gets aggressive with them right away and makes Emily’s realistic explanation for Lizzy’s behavior null and void. If we were going for paranormal this whole time, I would’ve preferred more focus on that. I think the book would’ve been fine without the epilogue. It shows Lizzy repeating this unhealthy cycle even when she’s not being poisoned, and that’s an effective, spooky open ending. It reiterated that she wasn’t mentally well to begin with, and the gas exposure just made everything worse. I like that better than the idea that the house was directly manipulating her and every previous owner.
As a final note, I don’t think this title makes sense. It tricked me into thinking someone else was living in the attic for a while, but once that passed, it just felt like a lie. There was no stranger upstairs unless you count a dead person on the roof. And if that does count, a majority of the book wasn’t about her, so it’s still not a fitting title. There wasn’t anybody hiding in the attic, but in the end when there was, they weren’t strangers. The title and cover feel like false advertising a little bit.
The writing was okay, but it wasn’t a page turner. I think certain phrases were repeated a lot which sometimes took me out of it, but the story was effectively creepy. I did want to know about Sarah’s past and what was happening at the house, so I kept going and guessing. There were a lot of ways this could’ve gone, so the red herrings weren’t bad. I liked the parallels between the MC and the husband who use to live in the house, and I thought the way she identified both with the murderer and the murder victim made sense. I think some of the ending was foreshadowed well, and the twists were decent. The POV character switches at a certain point, and I understood what was happening, but that change was only introduced because the author didn’t know how else to do the reveal. Without spoiling it, I thought the ending wasn’t great because the last chapter and epilogue completely contradict each other. Each one has a different explanation for what’s been happening, and one of them doesn’t feel supported by the rest of the book.
There’s still a couple of loose threads that seemed important but don’t have an explanation by the end. A few things are brought up to add to the mystery and make you think, but they’re dropped and then you don’t know what happened or why they mentioned it. The book wasn’t too long or too short, but I wish those parts were integrated better so things didn’t just happen for no reason/without clarification. I’ll talk about that stuff at the end of this review so you can avoid spoilers.
I’m not sure if it’s intentional or if I came to this conclusion since it was on my mind recently, but there seem to be parallels between the The Yellow Wallpaper and this book. Both stories are about a mentally ill woman who moves into a new, big house and sleeps alone in a room with strange wallpaper. She doesn’t really like it, and as she spends more time looking at it, she starts to notice new details until eventually, she hates it so much she desperately rips it off the walls. This mirrors her psychological breakdown because as she’s slowly becoming increasingly unstable, the wallpaper bothers her more, and she takes out her frustrations on it. There’s also similarities when it comes to feeling watched by the walls and the FMC not being very close to her husband. I like The Yellow Wallpaper way more, and I don’t think they’re the same, but one chapter in the book gave me this idea, so I wanted to mention it in case it was interesting.
The cover is pretty even though the house in the story doesn’t look like that. The author’s note was thoughtful, and I’m happy for Matlin. I hope she’s successful with her future projects. I think she had good ideas about unreliable narrators, social media, and mental health that she played with here, but it didn’t fully stick the landing.
~SPOILERS BELOW~
The daughter who survived forty years ago was never heard from again, so she doesn’t really have a role in this story. The only impact she has involves her yelling “don’t kill me” three times as she ran down the street. Lizzy is haunted by that and imagines hearing it, and then it’s repeated by Emily. It’s too bad we never see what happened to the daughter, but it’s believable enough that she just disappeared and never came back.
The Amanda connection wasn’t fully explained, and maybe that’s on purpose, but I still don’t like it. Why did people mistake Lizzy for Amanda? They weren’t related, and they weren’t the same person. Why was Amanda so similar to Lizzy when they apparently had no connection? The boyfriend wasn’t sure if Amanda was her real name, and that feels similar to how Lizzy copies peoples’ identities and moves around. I thought they were trying to imply Lizzy forgot that she was Amanda, or maybe Amanda was her sister Sarah, but no. And I assume Amanda killed herself on the roof because the house was poisoning her, but why were her hallucinations identical to Lizzy’s? That makes it seem like they were both being played with, but the last chapter doesn’t go into it.
Who was the husband cheating with? This question doesn’t matter as much as the others, but I thought we’d find out who it was and how they met, and it just didn’t come up.
How did the hammer get bloody the first time if Lizzy didn’t kill her husband? It’s implied that’s what she does when she gets angry at him and blacks out, but the only person she murders appears to be Emily. (Of course the one nice character has to die.) Amanda has been dead this whole time, and Joe is still alive by the end, so the scene with Lizzy holding a bloody weapon goes unexplained. I could be forgetting something, or maybe she found the old murder weapon in the attic, but it felt like a loose thread when I started thinking about it.
Most of my questions could be answered by the epilogue ending that reveals the house was evil all along, but I don’t like that, because the carbon monoxide ending made sense on its own. Turning this into a supernatural story when it was grounded and psychological for 99% of it felt random. It felt like everything could have been in Lizzy’s head. She was imagining the house egging her on, and she was forgetting she wrote the notes. Then, Emily goes to the attic with her. Emily didn’t spend a lot of time in the house, so she couldn’t have been having the same visions as a poisoned, hallucinating Lizzy. Her finding the stains on the walls felt like she was working toward a real ending, but all of that was undone by the epilogue saying there were no stains and no one could find the carbon monoxide.
So the house is haunted, and it doesn’t want anyone to be there. It tried to drive Lizzy crazy and tricked Emily into seeing the stains, or it prevented inspectors from finding the gas. When a new family moves in, it gets aggressive with them right away and makes Emily’s realistic explanation for Lizzy’s behavior null and void. If we were going for paranormal this whole time, I would’ve preferred more focus on that. I think the book would’ve been fine without the epilogue. It shows Lizzy repeating this unhealthy cycle even when she’s not being poisoned, and that’s an effective, spooky open ending. It reiterated that she wasn’t mentally well to begin with, and the gas exposure just made everything worse. I like that better than the idea that the house was directly manipulating her and every previous owner.
As a final note, I don’t think this title makes sense. It tricked me into thinking someone else was living in the attic for a while, but once that passed, it just felt like a lie. There was no stranger upstairs unless you count a dead person on the roof. And if that does count, a majority of the book wasn’t about her, so it’s still not a fitting title. There wasn’t anybody hiding in the attic, but in the end when there was, they weren’t strangers. The title and cover feel like false advertising a little bit.
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Content Warnings
Minor: Death, Emotional abuse, Blood, Vomit
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I had a hard time with the cat poisoning. Not gonna lie, I almost quit. So be warned. This is twisty, turny with a creepy house and mysterious characters. But it was a little too vague-for-the-sake-of-mystery for me. Meh. The ending was great, though.
Wow! Just…wow! I’m going to need a minute before writing an actual review because damn!
Ok: I really enjoyed this book! The twisty plot kept me guessing as to the outcome. I recommend this book if you like Lisa Jewell’s None of this is True.
Ok: I really enjoyed this book! The twisty plot kept me guessing as to the outcome. I recommend this book if you like Lisa Jewell’s None of this is True.