Author: S.L Grey
Genre: Horror
Originally Published: July 26, 2016
Pages: 368
Price: £13.99 (Paperback from W.H Smiths)
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Series: Standalone
Source: Bought
About the book:
Mark and Steph are struggling to move on with their lives after armed robbers broke into their home and brutalised them. Shaken, they decided to get away and leave their troubles behind. A house swap in Paris with a couple they meet online, the Petits, seems to provide the perfect escape. But upon arriving for a week's luxurious break, they find themselves in a festering, run-down apartment. And when Steph attempts to contact the Petits, she gets no answer.
Unable to relax following a series of increasingly unsettling events, they decide to return home. Yet when they arrive, neither of them can shake the feeling that there's now something sinister about their own house. As time passes, Mark is terrorised by a series of unsettling visions. But is it all in his imagination or is there a far more worrying explanation...?
My review:
This book was exciting for a number of reasons, 1) it was my first horror, which was mega exciting, 2) half of it was set in Paris and who doesn't love Paris? and 3) it sounded so damn cool. But was it as good as I was expecting? Not entirely...
It managed to create an atmosphere that was undeniably good. It put you on edge, but wasn't too scary, which fitted the scenes pretty well. The atmosphere was great! The plot just didn't back it up very well. In the end, it was deflating because I knew it could have given more. They had such a good idea to work with, with the perfect characters, in the perfect setting; there just wasn't enough done with them. The few events that did happen left me thinking 'ooh that was a bit weird' but is that good enough to call it a horror? To be honest, I'm not sure. As I said earlier, I've haven't read a horror before, so that might just be what horrors are like, but from a 'horror' I was expecting to be more than a little weirded out.
The chapters also had alternating points of view between Mark and Steph. Bleh. If you've read any of my other reviews I go on about this all the time. I really don't like it. But this book made me hate it even more. Dear authors, I know I'm not the fountain of all knowledge, and I know that you do not write a book to please only me, but please don't fill in missing parts from the previous chapter with the following chapter. That was a crap explenation, but let me develop... Mark did a lot of crazy shit near the end of the book, which I read about in Mark's chapter, as he did it. But then, in the following chapter with Steph, it went back to before he did it to play the scene out in her perspective. CHANGING THE POINT OF VIEW DOESN'T CHANGE THE CONTENT, IT'S JUST THE SAME THING TWICE. It made reading really sluggish for a while and made me think that they decided early on that the chapters would alternate but then they ran out of stuff for Steph to do. Normally, if it had happened once of twice I would have let it go, but it happened all the time. Mark did something, then it would play out again in Steph's chapter. This must have happened for at least 5 chapters, near the end. That's just less than 1/5 of the book. Yes, Steph did do some stuff after the whole Mark bit, but it was still half a chapter of me reading stuff I've already read. It annoyed me considerably.
To conclude, I know I've just been on a massive rant, but 'The Apartment' wasn't actually that bad. It's a good thing to read late October if you want to get a little spooked. It shouldn't scare you in any way, but it does get a little weird. The ending was a bit meh, but maybe I was just bitter because of the chapter thing, I don't know. Do I recommend it? Yeah, I know my review tells otherwise, but don't all my reviews? On the whole, I did enjoy most of it, and it's the perfect horror for people who don't want to actually get scared.
Do you read much horror? Excited for Halloween? Were you scared by 'The Apartment'? Let me know in the comments!
Contact me! theintrovertswonderland@gmail.com
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