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A review by rereader33
The Man in the Picture by Susan Hill
5.0
2024 February Reading Challenge
Prompt: read a book you know nothing about
This was a haunting, disturbing, yet hard to put down novel. I love horror novels dealing with art (as is evident by my love of "The Picture of Dorian Gray") so when I saw this hidden gem I knew I had to read it. This is a short novel, not even 150 pages, but it is so concisely and efficiently written that I firmly believe it would have been worse had it been longer. Told in multiple stories being told to others, this is a ghost story at heart and written well. The descriptions were haunting without being over-written, the flow was solid and kept me engaged from start to finish, and the characters served their purposes well. The lore was sparse but worked well for the story-telling aesthetic and kept the mystery and tension strong. While I definitely could see where the story was going, it didn't diminish my enjoyment nor lessen the tension I felt as I got to the end.
I had a ton of fun reading this novel and look forward to reading more from this author. This was a short, tensions filled read that showed the horrors of the cyclical nature of revenge.
Prompt: read a book you know nothing about
This was a haunting, disturbing, yet hard to put down novel. I love horror novels dealing with art (as is evident by my love of "The Picture of Dorian Gray") so when I saw this hidden gem I knew I had to read it. This is a short novel, not even 150 pages, but it is so concisely and efficiently written that I firmly believe it would have been worse had it been longer. Told in multiple stories being told to others, this is a ghost story at heart and written well. The descriptions were haunting without being over-written, the flow was solid and kept me engaged from start to finish, and the characters served their purposes well. The lore was sparse but worked well for the story-telling aesthetic and kept the mystery and tension strong. While I definitely could see where the story was going, it didn't diminish my enjoyment nor lessen the tension I felt as I got to the end.
I had a ton of fun reading this novel and look forward to reading more from this author. This was a short, tensions filled read that showed the horrors of the cyclical nature of revenge.