My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Last year I read and really enjoyed The Pretty Ones, so I picked this up to celebrate Women In Horror Month.
I also kept hearing there was a Ouija board, a doll, a cemetery and that it was super scary, so of course I was interested. These are some of my favourite tropes! Actually, I love them so much I even wrote a novel of my own featuring these three tropes. And being a writer, I HAD to check it out to make sure it was nothing like mine. And I'm happy to say that nope, nothing alike. ;)
Anyway, enough blabbing. Let's talk about this very cool story.
Maggie Olsen is in college at the moment, and very happy to be away from her childhood home. But when one of her sisters calls in the middle of the night to tell her something awful happened to their other sister, she has no choice but to return.
No choice but to go back into the house where she messed around with the Ouija she bought herself for her birthday years ago. The room where she befriended something malicious. The same place where family tragedy keeps happening because of what she did.
And might be about to find out that even if putting distance between herself and the terrible past still haunting Maggie helped her find a stable life, evil doesn't forget and is always waiting...
This was such a great story!
I loved how well Maggie's current sad and heartbreaking ordeal was balanced out with young and innocent Maggie determined to find adventure. Her kind thoughts about visiting the cemetery soon make her an ideal target, once again proving that: no good deed goes unpunished. She was being sweet and even what she did with the doll, trying to protect her, carries a heavy price.
The way the story unfolds set the perfect tone and emphasises the creepy factor. Actually amps it up in your head. There are plenty of fast-paced stuff that happens, but the freakiest scenes were the ones where everything slowed down. When there was tap-tap-tapping, or doors opening by themselves, or shadowy reflections in mirrors. Very cool.
Oh, and the way the scene where Maggie first watched The Exorcist was written is utter perfection. Really captured the horror of that movie. And not just because it mirrored Maggie's ordeal, but because if you happened to be a very young kid (as I was) when you first watched this movie, then yeah, totally feeling it.
There's also a bit of a sisterly twist in the end that I should've seen coming but didn't even want to consider... so yeah. Yikes.
Well, this is another story from Ania Ahlborn that I really enjoyed. Glad I've got a bunch more on my Paperwhite!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment