Book Name: The Haunting of Rookward House Author: Darcy Coates Genre: Horror, Occult, Ghost story, British Fiction Blurb: She's always watching... When Guy finds the deeds to a house in his mother’s attic, it seems like an incredible stroke of luck. Sure, the building hasn’t been inhabited in forty years and vines strangle the age-stained walls, but Guy is convinced he can clean it up and sell it. He’d be crazy to turn down free money. Right? The house is hours from any other habitation, and Guy can't get phone reception in the old building. He decides to camp there while he does repairs. Surely nothing too bad can happen in the space of a week. But there’s a reason no one lives in Rookward House, and the dilapidated rooms aren’t as empty as they seem… A deranged woman tormented a family in Rookward forty years before. Now her ghost clings to the building like rot. She’s bitter, obsessive, and jealous… and once Guy has moved into her house, she has no intention of ever letting him leave. My Review:
Overall: 5 out of 5 Cover: 5 out of 5 Darcy Coates has done it again. Another fantastic read. I loved everything about this book. Like Craven Manor, Rookward House gave a sense of character to the house itself. Something I have only seen executed well in stories by Edgar Allen Poe. The story starts out introducing Guy, a man who finds out through a rather messy spring cleaning that his mother has owned a house she never seemed to know she had. Without knowing the dark secret of said house, Guy goes to begin fixing it up so he can sell it and get his mom out of debt. To add to the tension, Guy is suffering from demons of his own including an anger issue and a bad break up whereas he backed over his former lover. Enter the Rookward House, an abandoned, broken down structure where the most horrifying murder takes place involving a receptionist embodying "hell hath no fury." Throughout his attempt to fix the house up, Guy encounters a ghost who appears to have mistaken Guy for her former lover. Here comes the chaos. The ghost is dead set (pun intended) on having Guy for her own. Something that makes me a returning Coates fan is her ability (as I said before) to give inanimate objects a life of their own. This is something I haven't seen in anything outside of Lovecraft or Poe, yet Coates manages to do this perfectly. I would recommend her work to anyone who loves riveting plot lines, the scariest ghosts and continuous tension rivaling that of Neil Gaiman. Wonderful characters, plot twists that flow perfectly with the story and an immersive world, Rookward House is another horror gem in a sea of B-rate plots and cookie cutter characters. Goodreads // Amazon // Website
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorMy name is Iona Caldwell. I'm the author of the British Occult Fiction, Beneath London's Fog set to be published by FyreSyde Publishing October 2019. When I'm not busy weaving worlds of the arcane and dark, I'm spending time out in nature. I love books. My biggest inspirations are H.P Lovecraft, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman and Edgar Allen Poe. I blog about many things but mostly everything bookish. Archives
August 2019
Categories
All
|