Tag: reviews

Book Review: House of Leaves

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“I still get nightmares. In fact, I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I’m not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares.”

― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

This book is an undertaking. That’s not to say it’s too difficult for most, or that it’s too terrifying for most. I think reviews that oversell that do it a disservice and limit its audience. But, I will admit, it’s not an easy fall read to be breezed through in a few days. It’s a book you need to sit with as you read it, tracing the three different narratives and how they coalesce together.

To put it simply: Johnny discovers an older book–a film analysis of a movie that Johnny can’t find proof exists. The movie is a homemade documentary about a strange house owned by the Navidson family. The house seems to be bigger on the inside than the outside.

Seems simple enough, but in reality? It’s anything but. Don’t let that intimidate you.

This book is a masterpiece of post-modernist horror, taking you through a journey with it’s artistically printed page layouts, which only add to the terror somehow. The tension builds up slowly, but creeps in where you don’t expect it, everbuilding until it crescendos into multiple moments of terror.

If you’re intimidated by the footnotes, you can conceivably avoid the footnotes and B and C plotlines, following only the A plot of what the film contains. Then it becomes far easier to pursue the story down the rabbit hole, only missing some killer quotes and amazing thoughts on the nature of grief, but nothing that massively impacts the A plot.

Give this book, which reads as some of the most terrifying found footage ever discovered, a chance to haunt your dreams. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed!

Just remember: This house is not for you.

Book Review: Pet Sematary

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How does one speak about the horror and insanity of grief? The great poet Rumi wrote: “Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.” But…

I don’t think Rumi predicted Pet Sematary. 

“When the Creeds move into a beautiful old house in rural Maine, it all seems too good to be true: physician father, beautiful wife, charming little daughter, adorable infant son-and now an idyllic home. As a family, they’ve got it all…right down to the friendly car. But the nearby woods hide a blood-chilling truth-more terrifying than death itself-and hideously more powerful. The Creeds are going to learn that sometimes dead is better.”

When a neighbor shows the Creeds a strange Indigenous artifact in the woods which can raise the dead, he warns them to never use it, using their now-alive-again but utterly feral cat as an example of how things can go wrong. But when the Creeds’ young son dies a violent death, the parents can’t help but be driven to desperate means to save their young child. But Gage certain comes back in another form–Gage comes back wrong.

This book is more than just a scary child story, though believe me Gage is terrifying. This is a story of the lengths that grief with push and pull and break both people as individuals and as a family unit. There ARE several trigger warnings listed here: child death, animal death, gore. Please be mindful of these warnings going in, as well as the offensive use of Native imagery and culture.

That said, this book is terrifying and very much a great read for people wanting to start the journey to more intense horror stories! If you think, based on the plot and the tws, that you can handle the book, please try! It’s classic King at his absolute best, and worth a read through especially during spooky season!