A review by andipants
The Graveyard Apartment by Mariko Koike

3.0

This book was interesting, but veeeeery slow for much of the story. There are a handful of creepy scenes scattered throughout, but so many pages are taken up with the characters discussing or agonizing over them afterwards, or even just scenes of everyday life, that it's hard to find any sense of urgency until the last few chapters. It's also never exactly clear what the nature of the threat is, nor what the connection to the abandoned construction project might be, even at the very end; I understand leaving a fair amount up to the imagination (because that's almost always creepier than anything the writer could communicate on the page), but I found the lack of even indirect hints here more dissatisfying than anything else. The issue of the main characters' guilt over Teppei's first wife also never really seemed to go anywhere, and I'm not sure what it added to the story.

That said, it was an interesting story, and some of the creepy bits were pretty creepy, if sometimes a bit predictable. I liked the main characters and found them compelling. A solid fair-to-middling, I'd say.