If the book were written better, I'd say it would be a great performance. Overall, the performance of Suehyla El-Attar is really well done. I don't think anything really happened until half way through. Most of the story itself is just arguments and drama between the main characters, who are very hard to distinguish from one another. I've got a general idea of what most of the yokai mentioned are, but for anyone who doesn't, or for a very niche yokai, naming it means nothing but hitting a character limit. This leads to my biggest flaw to this book Do not mention a yokai by name without a description about it. It really just reads off as someone who is very into Japanese mythology and figured that it would make it more interesting to include them. It tries so hard to be like the movie Cabin in the Woods and absolutely does not succeed. Tries too hard to be meta, really flops in the endĬharacters are so self aware of being in a horror situation that it really takes away from the fact that I should take the book seriously. That's expensive for so little entertainment. And even if it wasn't dumb, at only two and half hours long, it's not worth a credit. In other words, the story is dumb and doesn't realize how dumb it is. The narrator spends this whole bit thinking about how all these girls were buried alive within the walls of this house to keep it standing with their bones as though it isn't common sense that a rotting body inside a building would have the exact opposite effect. If that's not bad enough, the premise is silly.

First calls tickets, yeah, okay, but how did they get there from the airport, apparently separately only to arrive at the house at the same time? It's a basic lack of scene setting that makes the whole story feel unmoored. A fifth of the way through the story and I've been treated to excessive and repetitive metaphor laden descriptions of the characters in all their insecure, petty, childishness, but still have no idea what this old Japanese mansion actually looks like, or what time of day it is, or even how these four people got there. The author isn't great a setting the scene either. Unfortunately the story itself isn't great either, since it comes down to a group of childish, insecure people who have all dated each other in a haunted house.

It's so dense with metaphor and pretentious that the actual story drowns under it. The narrator is fine for the most part though sometimes she speaks a bit too fast which destroys what little atmosphere the writer is able to create. Pretentious prose combined with childish character

Nothing but blackened teeth amazon