Abandoned: A Ghost Story by Carol McMahon.
Synopsis… “Lisa has nowhere to go. She’s been kicked out of her apartment in Queens by her alcoholic boyfriend and has no other friends in the city. A co-worker tells her about a house on Staten Island where she can live in rent-free, but Lisa comes to realize the price that comes with living in an abandoned house.”
Overall rating 1.5 out of 5 stars.
My review…
As a life long horror fan I picked this book up expecting to be terrified, but it just wasn’t meant to be and I was really disappointed in this book, especially since I felt it had quite a lot of potential.
The author attempted to delivered a classic ghostly tale, complete with dark stairwells and things that go bump in the night (amongst other scary noises). However, for me it just didn’t come off that way.
I thought the author tried too hard to scare us, there was too much emphasis placed on the dark stairwell and the dark room upstairs that Lisa was showering in, or how cold Lisa’s flat felt even with the heating on.
She didn’t focus enough on the parts that mattered, such as expanding upon the neighbour downstairs, we never found out if she was a ghost. Or the “it’s you she wants” that Lisa hears through the hole in the floorboards. And at the start of the book we have a large group of people running to the ferry terminal, with no explanation whatsoever about it.
We were left with a lot of questions, which disappointed me. I expect a certain level of mystery and intrigue from horror books but also some answers to the burning questions…
I’m just disappointed with this book because as I said, I feel it had so much potential to it and if the author was to go back to it and rewrite it, I could imagine it being so much scarier.
Let me know if you’ve read this book and what you thought!
Until next time, Em xxx
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