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A review by cyanide_latte
What Haunts Me by Margaret A. Millmore
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
0.25
There are other reviews that cover in detail a lot of my issues with this book. I will describe those in brief: the pacing, the relationships between characters feeling believable or lacking depth, and a weird sense of disconnect between our main character George as the narrator and George actually as the main character. I'm not going to go on about those issues because again, others have already pointed them out and done so in a thorough way.
I will say I got sick very quickly of the ghosts being described as wearing "Harry Potter glasses." That and several variations on that descriptor appear so many times, especially in the first handful or so of chapters it is exhausting to the point of being nauseating. You could make a drinking game of it and get liver poisoning. I understand why the author was trying to use that descriptor to paint a very specific image, but in way, it essentially creates a sameface effect for all the ghosts just by description alone.
Additionally, and this is in my opinion the biggest turn-off to this book, is the ableism. Our main character George becomes a "ghost killer." Essentially he sees these ghosts with round-frame glasses and if he pokes the ghost (yes you read that right, he literally pokes them) they kind of cease to exist. The point where the ableism comes in is that when he kill-pokes most of these ghosts, it turns out they were somehow harming a living person, and by kill-poking them, George miraculously heals the afflicted person as a result. Ableist language is used when describing the ailment of a child and how he cured her of her developmental disabilities as a toddler by kill-poking the ghost harming her. Additional examples follow, and by the time we reach the point of a disabled veteran soldier who lost limbs having said lost limbs magically restored and him able to walk again like nothing ever changed just because George kill-pokes a ghost, the author has officially lost any goodwill I had left and any willingness to give benefit of the doubt. This is highly ableist to have some guy magically healing people's various extreme ailments and disabilities because they just happen to be caused by vicious ghosts that can be destroyed. I'm not sure I've seen a single other review point out how ableist and White Savior this is.
I found this book because the weekly Fangoria teletype email recommended it for one of the Kindle daily deals as a free/cheap horror ebook, and they really hyped it up, so I wanted to give it a shot and I had some Kindle credit. Now I'm glad I didn't waste any actual money of my own on it. This was an extreme disappointment, and it really needed a sensitivity editor and beta readers. I can't even appreciate this as horror, any hope I had there was gone. The real horror is the ableism that dragged this book down and could have been avoided.
I will say I got sick very quickly of the ghosts being described as wearing "Harry Potter glasses." That and several variations on that descriptor appear so many times, especially in the first handful or so of chapters it is exhausting to the point of being nauseating. You could make a drinking game of it and get liver poisoning. I understand why the author was trying to use that descriptor to paint a very specific image, but in way, it essentially creates a sameface effect for all the ghosts just by description alone.
Additionally, and this is in my opinion the biggest turn-off to this book, is the ableism. Our main character George becomes a "ghost killer." Essentially he sees these ghosts with round-frame glasses and if he pokes the ghost (yes you read that right, he literally pokes them) they kind of cease to exist. The point where the ableism comes in is that when he kill-pokes most of these ghosts, it turns out they were somehow harming a living person, and by kill-poking them, George miraculously heals the afflicted person as a result. Ableist language is used when describing the ailment of a child and how he cured her of her developmental disabilities as a toddler by kill-poking the ghost harming her. Additional examples follow, and by the time we reach the point of a disabled veteran soldier who lost limbs having said lost limbs magically restored and him able to walk again like nothing ever changed just because George kill-pokes a ghost, the author has officially lost any goodwill I had left and any willingness to give benefit of the doubt. This is highly ableist to have some guy magically healing people's various extreme ailments and disabilities because they just happen to be caused by vicious ghosts that can be destroyed. I'm not sure I've seen a single other review point out how ableist and White Savior this is.
I found this book because the weekly Fangoria teletype email recommended it for one of the Kindle daily deals as a free/cheap horror ebook, and they really hyped it up, so I wanted to give it a shot and I had some Kindle credit. Now I'm glad I didn't waste any actual money of my own on it. This was an extreme disappointment, and it really needed a sensitivity editor and beta readers. I can't even appreciate this as horror, any hope I had there was gone. The real horror is the ableism that dragged this book down and could have been avoided.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism