Eric Stone
I read this in 2022 and even though the specifics have faded, the memory of that ending still irritates me. I went into this expecting a haunting, but the "unreliable narrator" reveal was just awful.
The twist that he wasn't being haunted but was doing it all himself out of grief felt like such a lame, tired trope. Then you throw in him finding the killer, the killer's wife finding him, and him meeting the wife’s ghost... it just fell apart. When a book spends the whole time building up a supernatural mystery only to pull the rug out and say, "Actually, he’s just grieving and acting crazy," it feels like a cheap way to resolve a story. It’s a rare 1-star for me, mostly because the payoff was so unsatisfying it made the entire journey feel like a waste of time.
I read this in 2022 and even though the specifics have faded, the memory of that ending still irritates me. I went into this expecting a haunting, but the "unreliable narrator" reveal was just awful.
The twist that he wasn't being haunted but was doing it all himself out of grief felt like such a lame, tired trope. Then you throw in him finding the killer, the killer's wife finding him, and him meeting the wife’s ghost... it just fell apart. When a book spends the whole time building up a supernatural mystery only to pull the rug out and say, "Actually, he’s just grieving and acting crazy," it feels like a cheap way to resolve a story. It’s a rare 1-star for me, mostly because the payoff was so unsatisfying it made the entire journey feel like a waste of time.