The Apartment (S.L. Grey)

The Apartment by S.L. Grey

Oh, you guys! SpoOkctober is almost over! Our Wicked Wednesdays and Frightening Fridays are almost at an end.  

So, as you all know, I love horror. And as our society changes, I love seeing the new concepts for horror that arise. Like, the first time I used Uber, I honestly flashed back through every page of my forensic psych book. Does anyone remember that couch surfing website? "Come sleep on my couch for the night and just buy me dinner!" (Sure, I heard that line before. ) And now there's AirBnB.

I mean, I realize, logically, that there is only a very small percentage of the world that are actually violently insane, but honestly, wouldn't it be just my luck to end up swapping with them?

And then, just wandering through Barnes and Noble one night, this gift from the Horror Gods appeared on a table out of nowhere. (I mean, obviously not out of no where, it was a themed table, but still.) The Apartment, a creepy book about an AirBnB gone wrong, put out by Blumhouse Books (I've already mentioned that I love almost every movie out of their catalog) I was ecstatic!

A married couple from South Africa decides to use a house swapping website to spend a week in Paris and let another couple live in their home. That seems totally legit to me. Apparently they've had some rough times recently, and they're having a hard time getting past it. So they plop their daughter off at the parent's house (interestingly,also a B and B.) and wander off into Europe, expecting a miracle.

Well something supernatural happens, but it isn't a Miracle that's for damn sure. Between the creepy Mother Gothel witch living upstairs to the weird and gross garret where a homeless kid seemed to be crashing the stay itself is miserable. Of course their relationship starts to break down from the first moment of stress in the trip, and by the time they get home they're barely speaking.

THEN something ELSE happens!

But... I barely remember the details... because I was just so bored! I really wanted this book to work and be scary and blow my mind the way The Shining  did in high school. It didn't, though. Instead I found myself annoyed at how good it could have been if they hadn't ruined it. The atmosphere of the titular apartment was stale and imaginationless, rather than being a mysterious enigma. The build to a Big Bad was almost good, but the Big Bad just made it dull and unsatisfying.

I so hoped that I would recommend this book to you guys, but I really don't. I guess I was hoping for Hell House in the twenty-first century and was underwhelmed by this particular choice.

The final break down:

The Book
🌹🌹

The Writing
🕯️

Readability
🕰️🕰️