Book Review - The House at Midnight by Lucie Whitehouse

[byslantedlight]

It feels like ages since I did one of these, although surely it can't be that long... I fancied something totally gripping and atmospheric, and this is what ended up in my hand...

Someone on the cover says that it's "Gripping, accomplished and, ultimately, mesmerising", and I found that sort of true - only rather self-consciously true, somehow. Either I'm getting much more cynical and critical in my old age, or the author was a wee bit heavy-handed with her devices - anthropomorphising the house, using the weather to reflect mood, misdirecting us with the characters... I felt as if I was watching her do these things, rather than reading them, which was... odd. It wasn't really badly done, just - a bit too obviously?

The mystery itself was built up pretty well, and had me wondering what was going to happen (well, you knew there was going to be a twist and a revealing!) - only the twist and revealing came all at once, and in a single chunk of massive long backstory of exposition from a surprise character that explained everything, and...

...only it wasn't all over, because there was another surprise ending after the first one, only it was really the first ending that we'd been half-expecting, and...

I just felt that the author was so close to doing something interesting, only not quite skillful enough to pull it off. As if someone had told her - do this, you're going to be amazing!, only she couldn't quite. Oh, and there was a bit of a Mary Sue moment as well, where her main character (who wanted to be a writer) was told that she should write, because she had such a talent for metaphor... But because the author was quite clearly trying to metaphor us to a dramatic ending...

All of which makes it sound as if I can't have liked it, but that's not true either. I wanted to read on, I wanted to find out what was happening - it just didn't quite live up to its promise, I think...