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This House is Haunted 9780857520920 Books

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This House is Haunted 9780857520920 Books

This novel is like a paint-by-number horror story. It's not scary at all. I kept thinking there was bound to be some huge twist at the end, but there wasn't. You learn very early on (far earlier than the protagonist) what's going on, and it turns out, yes, that's what's going on. The protagonist is a female character written by a male author who clearly has no idea how women think. He should have written it third-person instead of first-person. As it is, the woman is flat, flat, flat. She has some sort of mild crush on a married attorney, which is pretty ridiculous and pointless. This is a tedious and not worth your time. Frankly, I'm shocked this is an author who has been published multiple times. I don't usually like to write reviews slamming novels since they are very subjective, but there is literally ZERO originality in this story whatsoever. The only creepiness comes from the odd young girl, but that also proves to be nothing of substance.


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This House is Haunted 9780857520920 Books Reviews

This review contains no spoilers.

This haunted house story is reminiscent of "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James, but still characterizes its own charm. After her father passes away Eliza Caine takes a job as a governess for two peculiar little children.

This novel I would not define as spooky or disturbing like some others I've read, but its simplistic prose and descriptive atmosphere made it a pleasant and easy read, a tame haunted house story for readers easily frightened.

Although Boyne writes Eliza Caine in the first person perspective, this is a plot driven story. There is, of course, some character development, and I surmise that if he had written this book in a third person perspective there would be even less.

One thing that makes this story unique from other contemporary novels is the fact that Boyne does not blatantly tell the readers how her character has developed. Instead he takes a sly, indirect approach leaving the readers to think for themselves by observing her change not by narrative descriptions, but by her dialogue and her countenance towards other supporting characters. For example, Boyne only describes her physical attributes in the beginning as "not entirely unattractive" but as the story progresses we learn through dialogue or simply by the setting that she is a young and naive little girl who loves reading, is peculiarly punctual, knows very little of life, death, or even the children she was supposed to teach. Boyne does not come out and say these characteristics, the reader needs to be intuitive and vigilant to figure it out for themselves. To me that is the difference between average writing and great writing.

For people who say there's no character development at all, I fathom they simply overlooked it. For a plot-driven story, there was a considerable amount.

Altogether, this was an enjoyable read. Fast, easy, not very spooky, elegant prose, and a strong ever-moving plot with some scenes of delightfully witty dialogue. My only negative critique is that parts of Act 2 slumped a little bit. For about two or three chapters it seemed Boyne had added extra scenes just to increase the length which may have crippled the flow and intensity. I really don't think we needed the scene where she ripped the Father in the Church a new one, but perhaps Boyne was trying to explain that she was so desperate she reached out to the Church, but not even the Church could help her. Who knows? Well, probably Boyne.

If you enjoy a light read on the subject of haunted houses, this is for you. If you want something really chilling, move on.
I was initially excited by this book by John Boyne. It’s a ghost story with a female protagonist that employs a contemporary take on “Dickensian” prose. What’s not to like or look forward to? I remember admiring The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and the thought of a radically different book from Boyne was alluring. A short perusal of the thick, heavy book told me that the text was large and the paper a heavy stock, which I shall take now as having been a sign that the publisher had little faith in it.

We are told straight away that we should expect the Gothic. Not only does the title (a nod to Charles Dickens) imply that there are ghosts, not only does the description and first page provide us with a virginal maiden (who is also the hero, like Catherine Morland), we are shown in an early chapter Dickens himself reading A Christmas Carol as a serious nod to the intention, which is also the catalyst to our McGuffin—the death of Eliza Caine’s father. We are given the antagonist, a ghost we know almost immediately is the children’s mother, Santina Westerley, and a mystery in “need” of solving. For the reader, the question of how the narrative will be resolved becomes “how can Eliza banish the ghost?” though Eliza never sees beyond surviving it and never takes steps to ensure any such favorable outcome. We see the hapless clergyman who is decidedly no help even in the end, which I couldn’t believe though I’m glad for, and we’ll talk about that when we come to the ending. Isabella and Eustace’s addled father is our Byronic figure in an almost satirical way. In short, we have everything we need to call it a Gothic.

A major contributor to the Gothic ambiance throughout the novel is Dickens, who everyone we see in Norfolk seems versed in, and he has his nod every dozen or so pages. This serves no purpose except to prolong the mystery and nothing comes from the conversations where he makes such appearances. It does nothing to aid in the problem of the ghost. In fact, it’s purely for mood lighting that the references are made at all, and I’m sure those who appreciate Dickens will appreciate them, but that will give the narrative of This House Is Haunted a parasitic function whenever the references are employed. There is an extent to which those references to Dickens, the homage as it is used, should work, but it simply doesn’t because they are hyper-contextual and so frequent while remaining entirely insignificant to the story.

Our protagonist, Eliza, is dull. This is known apparently only to Heckling and Mrs. Livermore while the rest of the characters are fine with politely acknowledging that it is the author’s intention that we should believe she is the brightest woman in town. Her resistance to context clues and refusal to simply listen to other characters is the great mark against her, such as can be seen during her first conversation with Eustace, when she’s insisting the boy is a liar, or the more grating refusal to listen to Isabella during their first meeting. Fortunately, it is those early occurrences that allow us to ignore her stubborn refusal to listen to nearly every character going forward. If only she had been presented as aloof or passively intelligent, always trying to get out of scenes or conversations then we could say that her protagonist struggle is one that is earned, that it was her awkward social behaviors that were responsible for a congruent prolongment of the mystery rather than the hectoring stubbornness of ignorance that was employed.

The fact that she believes that she is such a smart girl and that so many other characters believe it succeeds in impressing on readers that her character is annoying. I can’t help my prejudice that we the readers should not know more about the story than the first-person narrator. She asks inane questions of irrelevant characters in her attempt to solve the mystery of the “presence” when she may well have discovered all that she needed to know after a day or two of talking with the children. Everything she learns about Gaudlin Hall and its inhabitants are pointless relative to the story’s outcome since Eliza becomes the boy Eustace’s guardian for roughly the same reason one of us might take in a puppy.

As a narrator, Eliza’s credibility as a “smart” girl is derived entirely from her “tell rather than show” style of delivering the narrative, which in my mind is contradictory to what a smart, supposedly well-read girl of twenty-two would do to present her case. The worst instance of this comes when she first meets Mr. Westerly at the end of one chapter and we are treated to a hard cut before we’re told of the interaction at the start of the next. I can go further and say that her intelligence is such that she had no idea that her ravings to the other characters near the novel’s conclusion might result in a long stay for her in a sanitorium and that had Boyne not forgotten he set up the probability of her being committed she would almost have to have been. Look at this exchange between Eliza and the clergyman, Reverend Deacons
[“T]hroughout it all there is but one thing running through my mind.”
“And that is?”
“This house is haunted.”
He groaned loudly in protest and looked away, his face a study of pain and anger. “I will not hear these words,” he said.
This comes after Eliza has incredibly antagonized the clergyman. Bearing in mind that there was no witness to any ghostly presence except Eliza’s account, would that town of non-believers really have let her go after their lord’s manor had been destroyed by who else but apparently her? Deacons’s influence over the townspeople and the personal account of those people Eliza talked with, especially from Mr. Raisin, would have confirmed her for an involuntary stay somewhere. If a writer needs to write dishonestly to make their story work, if the context of the book has no special relationship with the ending or the main points of the book, then that writer need not bother with writing that book.

And the writing is bad. Boyne’s choice of “Dickensian prose” failed in its execution the moment he laid it down. There are few phrases that worked while most were seemingly selected for what one might think is their relevance rather than for their having been naturally occurring. Here’s an example of good writing early in the book
"Departing the theatre into the wet and cold night, I was still trembling from the dramatics of the reading and felt certain that I was surrounded by
apparitions and spirits, but Father seemed to have recovered himself and declared that it was quite the most enjoyable evening he had spent in
many years."
That paragraph sets the tone and transitions us into Mr. Caine’s death simply and effectively. It pains me to think that the man who wrote Striped Pajamas and demonstrated some mastery of the text in the paragraph above could be capable of the majority of this book. Terrible examples appear throughout the novel and I cannot possibly include all of them without nearly reproducing it, but here are two choice instances of the terrible prose
"Simply smiled at me, an unsettling smile, as if she was the owner of a great secret whose revelation could destroy us all."
And here let’s bask in an example with one extra little sentence to “round it out” as the author intended, which will also serve to demonstrate a fraction of the rage I feel for the ghost fighting nonsense, as there is more than a little ghost fighting
"Before it could reach me, however, another presence swept in from my left side and there was a sound like thunder as they collided, one roaring
at the other, before both presences disappeared entirely, leaving one thing, one familiar thing, in their wake.
The scent of cinnamon."
What flies in the face of this is that the book has mostly good dialogue, something you’d never guess with all its problems. It was a conversation between Eliza and her father that gave me cause to read beyond page 19. The dialogue with characters like Isabella and Eustace are generally insightful to the reader, even if they’re not for Ms. Caine. Mrs. Livermore is a lively speaker and Heckling is a gem of underappreciated wit. It’s really only those conversations with Mr. Raisin that are a disappointment.

The ending—we can forget but return to Isabella’s ghost—is one of the most highly labored sections of the book. The novel’s inconsistencies are brought to the forefront here as a careful reader will observe that a number of ideas planted throughout are not brought to anything resembling a payoff. In lieu of a paragraph-by-paragraph review that will involve being rude, let’s stick with the most egregious aspects of the ending in a roughly chronological order. Santina’s vengeful ghost, after having been slightly antagonized by the ghost of Mr. Caine for the latter half of the book, pursues Eliza through the halls of Gaudlin while engaging in an anime-style fight (not for the first time) with Caine, such as quoted above (and though the more temporally relevant example includes a deliciously bad scene with a ghost falling from a broken bannister, I’ll have to leave it out for both our sakes). This culminates in the destruction of the tower housing the children’s father, Mr. Westerly, along with Isabella, which alleviates the presence of Santina’s ghost and so also Mr. Caine. I don’t think we need to discuss why a knockout brawl between ghosts is stupid. The important part to note is that the story presents these details to us and we see Santina being carried off to the afterlife, but our Eliza and so Mr. Boyne has made a terrible error in judgment, that Santina’s ghost was attached to this world through Mr. Westerly.

I’ll ask the question of you now why did Boyne feel it necessary to tell us this? The most logical character for Santina to be attached to is Isabella; she is the reason for Santina’s preliminary forays into the madness that led her to inflict those grave injuries on her husband and the death of at least one woman while she was still alive and we’ve seen through animals that the mother and daughter still enjoy a special connection, as with the dog at the beach (while they went swimming in the middle of an English winter) and Heckling’s horse, not to mention that they still talk to one another in their hushed tones. Boyne knew this and killed off Isabella with her father in order to try to void our question, but decided he wanted to throw us off by relaying false information through Eliza’s “observations,” the net result of both gestures being nothing. He could have killed one or the other and achieved the same effect, but he wanted to justify putting Isabella’s ghost in Eliza’s house at the end, something done purely for effect, since apparently a ghost of the father wouldn’t have done the job, and as a result of some unquantifiable need to keep the non-suspense going, exposing us to more bad writing, and I think no one taking note of how long the story continues after Gaudlin comes down was surprised by that reappearance of Isabella.The subject of Santina’s attachment would have been better left unexplored by the characters.

The mechanical aspect of the ending is also a source of trouble Eliza accidentally exorcises the ghost. There is no point in the novel where exorcism is remotely broached and as mentioned it is never Eliza’s intention to do this—she wanted only to survive. Here we may return to the clergyman, flaccid in more ways than one. Deacons is seen denying the existence of a ghost he fears, becoming heated when pressed for help and so offers none and then he fails to do what anyone genuinely holding his views would have done at the time, which is to pray for the girl and get her some help, spiritual or otherwise. So the problem is resolved with no effort and as an afterthought.

I take further issue with Eliza not taking any income for her guardianship of Eustace. She left London because she could not afford her rent without taking in boarders. She came back to London with a young boy in her care and on the same salary from the same school where she previously worked. Because of that one grand gesture that Mr. Raisin is good enough to argue against, the action of the book can be summed up this way Eliza Caine’s father died and she adopted a troubled boy. It’s almost as if we are expected to just go along with Boyne’s conclusion and accept it as something other than nonsense simply because it makes Eliza look altruistic.

With a protagonist who is bafflingly dull and far less intelligent than she and the other characters believe; a ghost that is all too obvious and underwhelming; a ludicrous solution to the problem of the ghost (done purely to avoid a plot hole); and the Gothic elements, which are the core of the narrative, subdued by an ending that only has value in surprising anyone who has succumbed to reader’s fatigue, I cannot recommend this book. Its few surprises and instances of good writing—mostly dialogue, but also the last paragraph of chapter two—are overshadowed by the clunkiness of the prose, the too-many cliché moments (people dropping their cups at the mention of Gaudlin Hall, for instance), and its predictable and dissatisfying plot. If this paperback had been one of those tiny $7.50 editions thrown haphazardly in the romance section of a Barnes and Noble, I’m sure that I would have received it a great deal better. Someone should give the marketing people who worked on this book a raise or a promotion.
This novel is like a paint-by-number horror story. It's not scary at all. I kept thinking there was bound to be some huge twist at the end, but there wasn't. You learn very early on (far earlier than the protagonist) what's going on, and it turns out, yes, that's what's going on. The protagonist is a female character written by a male author who clearly has no idea how women think. He should have written it third-person instead of first-person. As it is, the woman is flat, flat, flat. She has some sort of mild crush on a married attorney, which is pretty ridiculous and pointless. This is a tedious and not worth your time. Frankly, I'm shocked this is an author who has been published multiple times. I don't usually like to write reviews slamming novels since they are very subjective, but there is literally ZERO originality in this story whatsoever. The only creepiness comes from the odd young girl, but that also proves to be nothing of substance.