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tzurky 's review for:
All the Dead Lie Down
by Kyrie McCauley
Sigh. I really dislike rating a relatively unknown author with few books so low, especially when there was significant potential here. I needed a way to signal you’d not benefit from reading this imo.
This is a sapphic horror novel and neither the horror aspects or the sapphic part came together for me. That’s not because the book didn’t have good characters or good ideas (both creepy ones and existentially horrific ones), it was the execution. The blurb says it’s for fans of Bly Manor and that’s not only on point it undersells how much of this book was written to match the series and in the hopes of getting picked up. The attempt to be cinematic is also what killed the book imo - the author wrote it exactly as she’d have wanted to see it onscreen (you can really tell throughout that the scenes are “seen” and not lived), missing out on the fact that there would have been copious stage directions in the case of a screenplay. … and also that what makes sense onscreen and for purposes of dramatic tension doesn’t really translate that well to a book.
So here are my complaints:
1) the events are too rushed to give both the romance and the sense of imminent danger a chance to linger in your mind. Neither the scenes nor the characters get a chance to breathe. Case in point being the titular scene (yes the author wrote a whole book just to get to this one scene). You’d think it gets the buildup it deserves right? Being the climax and all? Well if you call half a page a buildup then yes. But honestly it’s about the 5th climax in a row and it just doesn’t hit all that strongly since the previous climaxes and especially the one that came immediately before are much more emotional.
I like my horror creepy but the author manages to make an extremely haunted and objectively dangerous gothic house not just mundane but boring. You have plot elements here that are not just incredibly scary, but also very gross, sad and existentially troubling in this book but they’re so underwritten they barely register.
2) Too much is happening and the important and truly scary aspects are drowned out by everything else. The book has a tone problem. It attempts to intersperse actually horrific imagery and scenes with hot romance and mundane domesticity and it does so very poorly, because the characters themselves visibly and explicitly start to lose interest in the horror much too early. Furthermore, events are treated very unevenly: bird hits the window and dies? Horror level “completely freaked out”. Revelation that makes you question everything you know about your life? Not dealt with in the moment, no meltdown or anything, just a throwaway line later in the plot. “I cried about it for a while”
This book should have either been double the length or significantly trimmed down the horror tropes it wanted to cover so that we wouldn’t have had to spend time with so many unnecessary little eerie moments and jump scares that were given so much room and thought by the protagonist only for her to react nonchalantly to actual life-threatening situations.
I’m honestly left baffled because this book’s whole problem is that a plot summary and play-by-play description would make it sound incredibly interesting and pique my curiosity but when you read all these amazing moving events on the page, you’re left with an “eh”.
This is a sapphic horror novel and neither the horror aspects or the sapphic part came together for me. That’s not because the book didn’t have good characters or good ideas (both creepy ones and existentially horrific ones), it was the execution. The blurb says it’s for fans of Bly Manor and that’s not only on point it undersells how much of this book was written to match the series and in the hopes of getting picked up. The attempt to be cinematic is also what killed the book imo - the author wrote it exactly as she’d have wanted to see it onscreen (you can really tell throughout that the scenes are “seen” and not lived), missing out on the fact that there would have been copious stage directions in the case of a screenplay. … and also that what makes sense onscreen and for purposes of dramatic tension doesn’t really translate that well to a book.
So here are my complaints:
1) the events are too rushed to give both the romance and the sense of imminent danger a chance to linger in your mind. Neither the scenes nor the characters get a chance to breathe. Case in point being the titular scene (yes the author wrote a whole book just to get to this one scene). You’d think it gets the buildup it deserves right? Being the climax and all? Well if you call half a page a buildup then yes. But honestly it’s about the 5th climax in a row and it just doesn’t hit all that strongly since the previous climaxes and especially the one that came immediately before are much more emotional.
I like my horror creepy but the author manages to make an extremely haunted and objectively dangerous gothic house not just mundane but boring. You have plot elements here that are not just incredibly scary, but also very gross, sad and existentially troubling in this book but they’re so underwritten they barely register.
2) Too much is happening and the important and truly scary aspects are drowned out by everything else. The book has a tone problem. It attempts to intersperse actually horrific imagery and scenes with hot romance and mundane domesticity and it does so very poorly, because the characters themselves visibly and explicitly start to lose interest in the horror much too early. Furthermore, events are treated very unevenly: bird hits the window and dies? Horror level “completely freaked out”. Revelation that makes you question everything you know about your life? Not dealt with in the moment, no meltdown or anything, just a throwaway line later in the plot. “I cried about it for a while”
This book should have either been double the length or significantly trimmed down the horror tropes it wanted to cover so that we wouldn’t have had to spend time with so many unnecessary little eerie moments and jump scares that were given so much room and thought by the protagonist only for her to react nonchalantly to actual life-threatening situations.
I’m honestly left baffled because this book’s whole problem is that a plot summary and play-by-play description would make it sound incredibly interesting and pique my curiosity but when you read all these amazing moving events on the page, you’re left with an “eh”.