ebook review: Hollow House

No one in Willow Street pays it any notice, not the disgruntled Campbell family next door, not Alice Cowley and her suicidal daughter, or Mr. and Mrs. Markham down the road. Not even Darryl, the loner at number seventy, who is abnormal himself, thinks much about it. It is just the old Kemper House, forgotten and abandoned.

Until it makes itself known.

When the stench of death wafts from Kemper House through Willow Street, and comes to the attention of recent resident and newspaper reporter, Ben Traynor, it starts a chain of horrors that brings Kemper House's curse into their own homes and leads others direct to its door. Kemper House not only haunts its neighbours, it infects them with an evil that traverses time and reality itself.




My Review:

I feel like this book started out well enough. It was rocky, but interesting enough to keep you reading. The introduction of each character kept me curious enough to keep turning the pages. I do feel like some characters were better developed than others, and that may just be a result of having too many characters involved. The main story itself was an interesting concept and if the Evil Thing in this book had been anything like the Evil Thing in My Best Friend's Exorcism or the Evil Thing in Daughters Unto Devils I might have been more interested. As it was, I feel like there wasn't any real moral or psychological dillema--it turned into your average everyday Ghost/demon/boy/house/whatever killing people in graphic and sometimes disturbing ways.
I guess if you're into Man Vs God, you'll like this book. I prefer Man Vs Man or Man vs. self (although in this case I guess man vs. real demons instead of inner ones)  myself, and would have liked to see the same story, but with a different style of evil. 

3/5

Book review: Daughters unto Devils

When sixteen-year-old Amanda Verner's family decides to move from their small mountain cabin to the vast prairie, she hopes it is her chance for a fresh start. She can leave behind the memory of the past winter; of her sickly Ma giving birth to a baby sister who cries endlessly; of the terrifying visions she saw as her sanity began to slip, the victim of cabin fever; and most of all, the memories of the boy she has been secretly meeting with as a distraction from her pain. The boy whose baby she now carries. 
When the Verners arrive at their new home, a large cabin abandoned by its previous owners, they discover the inside covered in blood. And as the days pass, it is obvious to Amanda that something isn't right on the prairie. She's heard stories of lands being tainted by evil, of men losing their minds and killing their families, and there is something strange about the doctor and his son who live in the woods on the edge of the prairie. But with the guilt and shame of her sins weighing on her, Amanda can't be sure if the true evil lies in the land, or deep within her soul.

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My Review:

This book is spooky without being gory, which is great for me. I hate physical or gory horror but the emotional and religious horror in this book makes for a pretty good Halloween read. It's pretty quick too--great for a night at home during the month of Halloween or in between doing actual work at work. Recommended for fans of scary stories and people who want to join the scary bandwagon but don't like nightmares and watch disney shows and movies on a regular basis like me.