GENRE: Fiction/Contemporary Horror
SETTING: North Carolina, USA
SERIES: The Manse, #1
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: D
FROM PUBLISHER: Each Halloween, the Manse becomes a House of Horrors. Vampires, werewolves, ghouls and ghosts - not to mention Frankenstein's monster - stalk the premises. Bats and spiders drop upon the unwary. At every turn a new fright awaits - all in fun, of course.
But the Manse's history of horror is ancient and terrible - more awful than the innocent Trick-or-Treaters can imagine. For twelve years it has been biding its time, feeding on the fear its unsuspecting visitors so willingly offered...
Until tonight. Tonight is the Thirteenth Annual House of Horrors. It will be the last. Tonight, at the Witching Hour, all Hell will break loose.
MY THOUGHTS: Graded D for dull. The cover sucked me in. I was fooled by a pumpkin. Twin sisters own the Manse and one of them is evil. Something she did decades ago has caused the Manse to become haunted. I guess because the number thirteen is considered an unlucky number to some is why the author chose the thirteenth year of the Manse being in operation as a haunted house for things to go haywire.
We got no backstory on any of the main characters except a little towards the end on Elizabeth but for some reason got some on one of the many extra secondary characters. There were too many characters in this book (PoJo, Davy, Randy, Frank, Ted, Vince, Buddy, Elizabeth, Florence, Dood, Samantha, Zack, Pearl, Peter) and not one of them was interesting in any way. Out of all the main characters we only got the age of one, and that was Elizabeth. I have no clue of the age range of the others. Nothing about them made me think they were younger, like in their twenties, so maybe they're in their thirties, who knows?
There were three 'scary' incidents that happened inside the Manse before all hell broke loose at the end, two of which involved secondary characters, but because I didn't care a thing about those characters, I just wasn't interested. And I'm tired of main characters always surviving bad stuff in books and film.
SPOILERS: There were a few interesting scary scenes. A little boy named Davy was spooked at the Manse so he went outside to escape it and saw a fountain statue come to life. Her face was made up of hundreds of yellow eyes that turned into one huge eye. She pivoted around with swollen cheeks and water sprayed out of them towards Davy. Another scene near the end, on Halloween, there was a maze of mirrors in the Manse that began to suck children into it. One creature was trapped in the mirror and its eye exploded and a 'puss-like fluid' splattered onto it.
The story was just longer than it needed to be with boring characters and boring dialogue.
There's a sequel to this called Torments.
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