Book Review: HOUSE

Title: House

Author: Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker

Publisher: Thomas Nelson

Pages: 362

My GoodReads Rating: 

Jack and Stephanie Singleton, he a published author, she a country singer, are a married couple who are drifting apart. They are heading to a counselling session when a patrolman causes them to lose their way. Later, the cop, Morton Lawdale, gives them directions to where they want to go, but they still end up in the back of beyond where a rubber mat with steel spikes in the middle of the road messes with their tyres, leading them to seek shelter at the Wayside Inn.

There they meet hotelier Randy Messarue and his partner, psychologist Leslie Taylor, who have met with a similar accident and have sought shelter at the Inn. Later, the four meet the house owners, Stewart and Betty and their son, Pete. From the beginning, it is apparent that there is something off about these houseowners.  

At this point, a man wearing a tin mask, the Tin Man, crashes a car into the front porch, then throws a tin can into the house. The can contains a sheet of paper with three rules. 1) God came to my house and I killed him. 2) I will kill anyone who comes to my house as I killed God. 3) Give me one dead body, and I might let rule two slide. Game over at dawn.

Before long, the houseowners and then the guests are trying to serve up one dead body, in the hope that they will be able to leave. Then they meet a young girl called Susan who has been hiding out in the House. The Tin Man wants the guests to kill her in exchange for freedom. What they don’t know is that the House has an appetite, and they might never leave.

 

 

WHAT I LIKED:
The patrolman rolled his head to crack his neck was such a potent image of menace and aggression.

 

The tension shows up pretty early in the story. The tension between Jack and Stephanie was so intense that by the time they reached the inn, it was clear that this was a horror story with the tropes of haunted house and crazy killing ahead. This tension was also evident when the seven sat down to the evening meal. The meal itself is a classic horror trope, rotting meat with maggots crawling in it.

 

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE:

I didn’t like this sentence: Hated the terror that had him squealing like a schoolgirl in his own mind. Isn’t fear a raw human emotion that affects both genders equally? Why couldn’t this sentence be rephrased so the misogyny was removed?

I found Stephanie very selfish and self-centred. The others showed better character under duress, at least initially. Why she began to hate Leslie almost at sight sounded very petty and trivial.

 

The narrative induced neither fear nor chills. The house is alive, and keeps changing the layout constantly, and bad things begin to happen. The house serves up double and later, multiple, versions of the characters. And there’s no way for us to figure out whether what’s happening is real or an illusion. The premise sounded good, but it made for exhaustive reading and became tiresome. There were no dips and crests, just lows and more lows. Nothing to help us catch our breath.

 

At one point, the narrator tells us that Betty looked at Jean, several paragraphs before Betty has even introduced herself to the newcomers in her house.

 

WHAT DIDN’T WORK FOR ME:

Technically, the Tin Man’s three rules are only 1 feeble rule, Rule 3. The first is a confession, the second a stated intention.

 

For a horror story to win, the reader needs to care for the characters and what happens to them. I didn’t feel invested in any of the characters, not even in Jack, who had the most agency and whose limited PoV the story was written in.  

 

It would have helped if the authors had revealed something, but as late as the 78pc mark, we have no clue why these four are in the soup they are in.

 

The allusions and references are Christian, but their impact is nullified as they weren’t clear in the context of plot events. Unlike say, Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant or CS Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. How and why Susan is revealed to be what she is revealed to be makes no sense. The advice she offered was utterly vague. After 400 pages, I came away feeling relieved the book was over.

 

As a concept, it may have sounded fine at the idea stage but reading it doesn’t give us a sense of having encountered some dark night of the soul. Susan’s words don’t resonate with us. And after all of that, her identity was never properly clarified.

ALL SAID AND DONE:

This was my first book by either of the two authors. Given their reputation, I expected something better than this.

 

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.)