Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey (2022)
For those of us who love a scary haunted house story, all the elements seem well in place here.....
Creepy house? Check.
Dysfunctional family forever scarred by their late patriarch, a serial torturer killer? You bet.
Horrific flashbacks to the bloody past history? Oh yeah.
Possible creepy supernatural incidents occurring with escalating frequency? Hmmm......who's moving stuff around in the room when nobody was looking?
Mention any of these haunted house tropes and you had me at hello.....ready for a chilly good time.....
Which "Just Like Home", I'm so sorry to report, doen NOT provide.
Boring. Snail's pace. And even in its climactic moments, when the book unleashes copious amounts of horror, violence and indescribable human body corruption.....the prose and storytelling never ever shift out of low gear.
Any haunted house story worth its ectoplasm should leave you with a bad case of the chills and an overpowering urge to turn all the lights on.
This one only left me with a relieved sigh that I finally got through it to the end without dozing off multiple times.
Sure, it's top heavy with an atmosphere of dread and its depiction of an especially toxic mother-daughter relationship is both simultaneously heartbreaking and frightening.
But the pacing here is literally non existent and the book did a better job of wearing you out than scaring you.
I wanted so much to love this so much, but it functions more like a horror oil painting instead of telling a story to keep you up.
2 stars (**) at best.
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