Scan barcode
A review by paracosm
House of Dark Shadows by Robert Liparulo
1.0
I first read this book many years ago and just now I'm realizing it's a big pile of wasted potential. The main premise is that there's this house in the middle of the woods, inside the house there's a hallway full of doors, those doors are actually portals that allow you to travel in time. The portals change so you can always find new places to visit. That's an amazing premise, which makes it the only good thing about this book.
Let's start with the characters. They are the most cliché white family you can imagine. All of their interactions, which are at best boring and at worst cringy, feel artificial, like they are really bad actors following a terrible script.
The writing style is also bad, I remember there's a single paragrah in which the name of one of the characters is repeated seven times. The book is filled with pop-culture reference that are used instead of explaining things. For example, instead of telling you a hotel is spooky it explains that it's just like the Overlook Hotel from The Shinning. Pop-culture references can be fun, but only used with moderation.
It's so obvious that the author did zero research while writing his novel, which is a specially big problem for a book that is supposedly based on real events. It takes one single Google search to learn that combats in the Roman Colloseum had a strick reglament and weren't actually to death.
Now I'm gonna go into spoilers but I don't think it matters because the book is so bad. At the end a man comes out of one of the doors, kidnaps the mom and goes back. We learn that the same thing happened with the grandmother, so the dad came back to the house to find her. How did he was planning to do that? The grandmother could be literally in any point of recorded history and most likely dead. It's so dumb.
There are another five books in the series and I don't know if I'm gonna re-read them.
Let's start with the characters. They are the most cliché white family you can imagine. All of their interactions, which are at best boring and at worst cringy, feel artificial, like they are really bad actors following a terrible script.
The writing style is also bad, I remember there's a single paragrah in which the name of one of the characters is repeated seven times. The book is filled with pop-culture reference that are used instead of explaining things. For example, instead of telling you a hotel is spooky it explains that it's just like the Overlook Hotel from The Shinning. Pop-culture references can be fun, but only used with moderation.
It's so obvious that the author did zero research while writing his novel, which is a specially big problem for a book that is supposedly based on real events. It takes one single Google search to learn that combats in the Roman Colloseum had a strick reglament and weren't actually to death.
Now I'm gonna go into spoilers but I don't think it matters because the book is so bad. At the end a man comes out of one of the doors, kidnaps the mom and goes back. We learn that the same thing happened with the grandmother, so the dad came back to the house to find her. How did he was planning to do that? The grandmother could be literally in any point of recorded history and most likely dead. It's so dumb.
There are another five books in the series and I don't know if I'm gonna re-read them.