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A review by honnari_hannya
The Graveyard Apartment by Mariko Koike
2.0
3.5 stars
As a huge fan of Japanese horror movies, I wanted to delve a little bit more into novels in this genre. This wasn't quite as scary as I wanted it to be—but overall, it did a fairly good job at raising the tension after each escalating incident with the monster in the basement apartment. I do wish we had a little bit more detail as to what, exactly, was the root cause of the haunting aside from just "evil spirits from the graveyard whose rest was disturbed." There is a lot of ambiguity in the nature of the haunting itself, as well—especially when the family ends up trapped inside the apartment building with no way out.
Has to be docked down to 3, because there were just so many stupid choices made. The reactions of the characters felt understated to the point where it became comical, especially since there is a young child involved in this equation. One would think that the parents would have a little more common sense than to repeatedly bring their daughter back to this apartment.
A few interesting plot threads related to the haunting also got dropped—including the spirit of the first wife visiting the husband in a dream, the visitations from the bird, and such. The scariest thing here is probably the creeping sense of dread as the family runs out of food and water, trapped in the heat of their apartment, rather than the actual haunting itself. Effective in that sense, but not exactly the scare I was looking for.
As a huge fan of Japanese horror movies, I wanted to delve a little bit more into novels in this genre. This wasn't quite as scary as I wanted it to be—but overall, it did a fairly good job at raising the tension after each escalating incident with the monster in the basement apartment. I do wish we had a little bit more detail as to what, exactly, was the root cause of the haunting aside from just "evil spirits from the graveyard whose rest was disturbed." There is a lot of ambiguity in the nature of the haunting itself, as well—especially when the family ends up trapped inside the apartment building with no way out.
Has to be docked down to 3, because there were just so many stupid choices made. The reactions of the characters felt understated to the point where it became comical, especially since there is a young child involved in this equation. One would think that the parents would have a little more common sense than to repeatedly bring their daughter back to this apartment.
A few interesting plot threads related to the haunting also got dropped—including the spirit of the first wife visiting the husband in a dream, the visitations from the bird, and such. The scariest thing here is probably the creeping sense of dread as the family runs out of food and water, trapped in the heat of their apartment, rather than the actual haunting itself. Effective in that sense, but not exactly the scare I was looking for.