garrettcz's reviews
363 reviews

How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Spoiler-free part of my review:

I typically really like Grady Hendrix's books, but this one was a letdown for me, though I did enjoy parts of it. Overall the story felt unnecessarily long and bloated.

Part of my review with spoilers:

I sort of look at this book as two separate stories. On one hand you have a fantastic story about grief, generational trauma, dysfunctional/estranged families, and motherhood. That half for me was really good. I'd give it a solid 4/5 stars. The characters were believable and engaging. Hendrix is really great at that.

On the other hand you have a mostly nonsensical supernatural story centered around not-scary-at-all puppets that came off to me as so silly it repeatedly ruined my immersion. I guess if you have a strong phobia related to dolls this book might be terrifying, but alas I do not, so I was mostly rolling my eyes during any scene that involved dolls, which is a lot of them.

The second I read the words "radical puppet collective" I almost DNFed to be completely honest.

While I was reading that part of the book I thought for a minute that maybe Hendrix was going to pull something really creative and switch it so that there weren't any ghosts and this was all something like multiple personality disorder or disassociation or something and the main characters were doing all of it, and that the whole puppet collective thing was going to explore that.

Unfortunately that wasn't the case, and instead we got the power of imagination...sometimes? Sometimes demons cursing things? Sometimes ghosts.

The imaginary dog monster didn't make any sense to the rest of the plot and seemed so silly and unnecessary. I feel like at some point the author just started throwing completely different things into the story and it just didn't land for me.

I did like the ending with the ghost moving on. That part felt solid.

That half of the story is a 1/5 stars for me.

Absent Thoughts Dressed in Black by Mike DeFrench

Go to review page

dark mysterious fast-paced

5.0

Age of War by Michael J. Sullivan

Go to review page

adventurous emotional tense medium-paced