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mortalmoe's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.75
audreyintheheadphones's review
2.0
A collection of objectively decent short stories about haunted houses, framed within a larger narrative that never quite gels. The stories, in order:
--"The Elms, Morecambe": a haunting image in search of an actual story, with plot and characters.
--"The Merry House, Scale Hall": slow-moving 70s Dr. Who-style story with bonus child torture and death, in case those are a concern.
--"Beyond St. Patrick's Chapel, Heysham Head": By far the weakest story of the lot. Okay parapsychologist, you're afraid of grass. Cool.
--"The Ocean Grand, North West Coast": My favorite of the collection, this is basically a love story to an old Art Deco hotel with ghosts. Very cleverly done, but needed a longer build up of tension to get a good frighten on.
--"The Temple of Relief and Ease": My other favorite in the book, this had the technical accomplishment in its writing, the details and well-written description of place and space that a lot of the other stories lacked. In addition, you really wind up sympathizing with the ghost as a character, and that happens exactly nowhere else in the book.
--"24 Glasshouse, Glasshouse Estate": A unique idea for a story, but, supposing that the incident described is supposed to be the main tragedy for the book's protagonist, the execution is flat and cold and, at its climax, ridiculous.
--"Slack's Farm, Trough of Bowland": Okay that was spooky and scary and disturbing.
I think my biggest problem overall is Unsworth's difficulty describing the interiors of rooms and exteriors of houses. That sounds small, but the book's ostensibly all about haunted houses, and each story is supposed to center around one particular house, so not being able to describe those houses well takes a lot of wind out of the sails.
The other problem is that the book is peopled entirely by men. Every character interacting in a story is male; the only women who appear are dead, or the protagonist can't be bothered to remember their names, symptomatic of the author's lack of interest in including them as subjects in the stories. In "Glasshouse", the one female character with more than one line of dialogue winds up with about seven lines (she is still dead), but mostly she exists to react to the protagonist and antagonist. I feel like there's no way you do this accidentally, as an author, and that's appalling.
Overall, some wonderfully big ideas in here, mostly ruined in the execution.
--"The Elms, Morecambe": a haunting image in search of an actual story, with plot and characters.
--"The Merry House, Scale Hall": slow-moving 70s Dr. Who-style story with bonus child torture and death, in case those are a concern.
--"Beyond St. Patrick's Chapel, Heysham Head": By far the weakest story of the lot. Okay parapsychologist, you're afraid of grass. Cool.
--"The Ocean Grand, North West Coast": My favorite of the collection, this is basically a love story to an old Art Deco hotel with ghosts. Very cleverly done, but needed a longer build up of tension to get a good frighten on.
--"The Temple of Relief and Ease": My other favorite in the book, this had the technical accomplishment in its writing, the details and well-written description of place and space that a lot of the other stories lacked. In addition, you really wind up sympathizing with the ghost as a character, and that happens exactly nowhere else in the book.
--"24 Glasshouse, Glasshouse Estate": A unique idea for a story, but, supposing that the incident described is supposed to be the main tragedy for the book's protagonist, the execution is flat and cold and, at its climax, ridiculous.
--"Slack's Farm, Trough of Bowland": Okay that was spooky and scary and disturbing.
I think my biggest problem overall is Unsworth's difficulty describing the interiors of rooms and exteriors of houses. That sounds small, but the book's ostensibly all about haunted houses, and each story is supposed to center around one particular house, so not being able to describe those houses well takes a lot of wind out of the sails.
The other problem is that the book is peopled entirely by men. Every character interacting in a story is male; the only women who appear are dead, or the protagonist can't be bothered to remember their names, symptomatic of the author's lack of interest in including them as subjects in the stories. In "Glasshouse", the one female character with more than one line of dialogue winds up with about seven lines (she is still dead), but mostly she exists to react to the protagonist and antagonist. I feel like there's no way you do this accidentally, as an author, and that's appalling.
Overall, some wonderfully big ideas in here, mostly ruined in the execution.
hauntedtesty's review
4.0
I enjoyed this! A collection of short stories, playing with the idea of ghosts forming in the spaces we live in and leave, and those ghosts not necessarily being actual people.
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