14 year old Richard’s friend gets eaten by a phone and then another one gets turned into an animal. He gets blamed for their disappearances. There’s a spooky house in the woods. Whas gon on…
I’ve never read any Jo Nesbo before but I’m familiar with his name - he was part of that wave of Scandinavian crime writers that followed the success of Stieg Larsson - and I’m a sucker for haunted house stories so my curiosity was piqued. Would a bestselling crime writer be able to pull off a horror novel?
The answer is a definitive FUCK. NO. The Night House is awful.
I loved RL Stine’s Goosebumps books when I was a kid. The Night House might be an homage to Stephen King and Ray Bradbury but it has much more in common with Goosebumps, although it’s not even close to being as good as any of those books. This is just crap, unimaginative YA pseudo-horror.
The story is dreary, the twists aren’t shocking but somehow manage to make the story less interesting, and they keep coming too - not that they add up to anything. Suffice it to say, there’s nothing remotely scary about this book besides the frightening amount of boredom it consistently elicits.
Some of the features of the story are plain annoying - words that sound like nonsense are obviously spelled backwards or convey clear codes. It’s amazing that amateurish crud like that made it to the final edit - Nesbo’s either a dimwit for thinking details like this are clever or this really is aimed at very young readers.
Nesbo’s prose is totally unremarkable but maybe his storytelling is better with his Harry Hole crime stories - I don’t know and I’m not fussed about finding out either. Regardless, he absolutely isn’t a good horror storyteller and The Night House was a complete waste of time. Reader beware - abandon all hope of an interesting read, all ye who pick this rubbish up!
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