Dead House - Billy O'Callaghan Dead House by Billy O' Callaghan caught my eye while browsing a bookstore lately as the cover and artwork is stunning and I am a sucker for a good Irish ghost story.
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I did enjoy the novel and O'Callaghan certainly knows how to create a magical sense of time and place. His descriptive writing of Irish landscape and climate is beautiful and real and this was one of the strongest elements of this short novel.

I didn't however connect with any of the characters or was I able to conjure up an image of them as I read the story and this was disappointing. The story was chilling and I loved how little bits of Irish history shined through as the harshness of the famime is brutally described. I really liked the ending as the author left a lot to the readers imagination which is what a good ghost story is all about.

A short novel with lyrical and descriptive prose and I look forward to future works by this author.

I was a little bit disappointed in the ending but it was still an amazing read. I thoroughly enjoy it! I loved the mysterious, creepy and well-built atmosphere and how the story is told through diary entries, police reports, transcripts and more. I have already started recommending it!

Rating: 2 Stars

DNF 35%

Again another weird book by Ms Kurtagich. The beginning started off good and interesting and slowly when downhill from there. I personally didn't like all the various ways of the story being told. It was too busy and very confusing...there are newspaper articles, video recordings, diary entries, dreams....Wayyy to much going on here. I think it would have been a great story if the author would have stuck to one way of telling the story...that's just my opinion.

This is a book for people who like straight up horror, like the girl coming out of the tv or mirror, the demon possessing the child's body, the paranormal events being caught on camera, etc. That type of horror isn't really my thing, but I was still able to get into this story. It deals with mental issues like Dissociative Identity Disorder, magical religious practices and dark magic practices. Much of it is diary entries or home video recordings.

She came out at night and I thought she was the fun one, the dark one. These two girls left each other notes to communicate, to let each other know exactly what was happening and what to expect should someone mention something that they didn’t understand. It seemed to me that Kaitlyn was more dependent on Carly than the other way around, for Kaitlyn talked about Carly continuously and she worried when she hadn’t heard from Carly even if it was just for a day or two. It wasn’t the perfect scenario but it worked for them until the day Carly vanished and the communication between the two of them was severed. What really happened to Carley? Did it have to do with the Dead House or was it Carly herself? Kaitlyn panicked, she was losing it when Carley didn’t respond to her: where did Carly go and why did she leave her? It wouldn’t be such a difficult question to answer if, Carly and Kaitlyn where not the same person. Carly is a girl, a girl who everyone sees during the day and Kaitlyn is the person who exists in the nighttime hours, taking over Carly’s body. Strange, yes, interesting, of course.

 

What I found most intriguing about this novel was all the different formats the author uses to get to the bottom of this mystery: letters, tapes, journal entries, diary entries, and interviews. These formats were recovered and now were being reconstructed to solve the unknown. There had been an accident where the lives of Carly and Kaitlyn’s parents were taken but the girls do not recall it. Between a facility where the doctors hope they can help them and their school, the girls meet a variety of individuals who help round out this novel. Each of these characters are instrumental to the case. Using a variety of formats, they try to piece together what happened and the story is relived. They are recreating history. I enjoyed listening to this novel as I thought the audio helped reinforce the different formats used in this novel, making the story more realistic. It was such a difference novel to listen to, not scary but mysterious and shadowy. I highly recommend listening to this novel on audio to get the full effect.