Title: BENEATH THE STAIRS
Author: Jennifer Fawcett
Publisher: Atria Books
Read: February 2022
Expected publication: out now
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟
Book Description:
A woman returns to her hometown after her childhood friend attempts suicide at a local haunted house—the same place where a traumatic incident shattered their lives twenty years ago.
What attracted me to this book:
Count me in for all the haunted house books!
My musings:
As soon as I heard the premise of Jennifer
Fawcett’s book BENEATH THE STAIRS, I knew I had to read it. And Fawcett’s
Octagon House is as creepy as it gets. Just from the author’s descriptions of
the house you would not get me anywhere near there, especially at night, but of
course true to any character in a horror film or a creepy story, the people in
this book are inexplicably drawn to the place. You may reason that if a door
that opens and closes at will and an unlit, dank basement doesn’t scream “run
for your life!” at you, then you may not be cut out for the natural selection
process – but then we wouldn’t have the opportunity to watch these characters
stumble headlong into disaster.
Whilst the story presents itself in
four separate timelines and various POVs, our main character is Clare, who
reluctantly returns to her childhood home of Sumner’s Mills to offer support to
her childhood friend Abby who is in hospital after a suicide attempt. Clare
knows some of the demons that have haunted Abby for most of her adult life,
because she was part of the events that started Abby on this slippery path of
trauma and obsession. Whilst Clare has been able to block out the events from
twenty years ago, she knows that it is all connected to the creepy house in the
woods, Octagon House – the site of a child’s disappearance and a family’s
murder long before Clare and Abby were born. To help her friend, Clare knows
she must finally confront the demons from their childhood ...
BENEATH THE STAIRS was a creepy
story that gripped me very quickly and kept me up at night. However, I felt
that it got a bit bogged down in the middle with detail that added little to
the mystery (all those teenage friendship dynamics could have been cut short),
and then wrapped up the ending so quickly that many of my questions remained
unanswered. I’m still not sure if I missed something crucial or if the story
had skipped over some of the detail that would have linked all the threads
together in a satisfying whole. Apart from the characters making questionable
decisions – after all, that is the essence of any horror story – I felt that someone
along the way would have called the police and saved themselves a whole lot of
trauma.
Summary:
All in all, I felt very divided about this book. On
one hand I loved the creepy, Gothic atmosphere and the haunted house setting,
which I could visualise vividly. On the other hand, I felt that the story lost
its way a bit with too many timelines and POVs and backstory, which never quite
came together in the end. I feel that the author wanted to pack too many
element into this book, which sadly only worked to dilute its creep factor.
However, as far as creepy house settings go, this one was atmospheric and
nightmare inducing and made for a fantastic backdrop to a ghost story.
Thank
you to Atria Books for the free electronic copy of this novel and for giving me
the opportunity to provide an honest review.
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