If you’re a fan of spooky stories where evil lives in a hungry haunted house, then How to Survive a Horror Story by Mallory Arnold will definitely whet your appetite.
When a bestselling horror author, who happens to be a pretty horrific human being, dies, several fellow authors of the genre are invited to the reading of his will at his family home.
The house itself is almost a caricature of the genre: antique furniture, musty portraits, strange noises, and mysterious movements. Oh yes, and the house likes to eat people.
The rest of the story, to me, is a cross between Stephen King’s Rose Red and Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. Chills and thrills throughout!
I enjoyed the nostalgia of the hungry haunted house and the anticipation of who would be next. The pacing was fast and action-packed, with vivid descriptive imagery.
I thoroughly enjoyed it, right up until the end. That’s when it went from creative to slightly contrived.
Morally speaking, the real monsters weren’t the people who did terrible things or even the house that ate people. Underneath the obvious horror, the true monster emerged: greed. And greed had the power to turn even the seemingly innocent into monsters of their own.
Despite my disappointment with the ending, I gave it 4 stars for the wild, wild ride!
