House of Shadows, Book 2
Synopsis:
In House of Secrets, Sophie and Joseph Argenton have survived the impossible…for now. But their escape from Northwood is short-lived. The beast survived, and attached itself to Joseph’s young cousin, Elise. Garrett writes to beg for their help. Joseph and Sophie travel to meet him at Kensington, a long-abandoned mansion that overlooks a dead town.
The house offers a small hope: its original owner had dedicated her life to researching the monster that possesses Elise. Garrett hopes to find a way to kill the creature without harming his daughter.
But Kensington is a dangerous building. Once the carriage leaves, they’re trapped inside the collapsing walls and forced to confront the horrors within.
Shrouded figures stalk them. Whispers echo through the night. Unmarked graves dot the property. And the dead are not as restful as they seem…
Edition:
E-ARC
My Thoughts:
First things first – House of Secrets was originally released on May 12, 2016 by Candlebreak, with this cover:
Honestly, I’m glad they changed the cover up for the re-release. I never would have requested this ARC if it had that cover. It just doesn’t look appealing to me at all. It has a sort of Victorian-Twilight thing going on that I don’t personally find at all appealing. So, I’m really glad that the cover got an update.
Did I read book one, you might wonder? No. I sure didn’t. Yet again, I missed that I was requesting a sequel. But, in this case, it didn’t seem to matter. This is a really short book (165 pages), but a surprising amount of that is devoted to recapping what took place in book one. I mean, there’s still a good amount of story here, don’t get me wrong, but it definitely didn’t seem to have hurt me to have not read the first one.
The Grimlock is definitely an interesting monster – I like that he’s physically a big icky (that’s a technical term), but also that he can (and does) possess and control people, which I imagine is a useful skill when one is a big scary monster. He can even reanimate the dead!
I just wish that I liked any of the other characters as much as I did the Grimlock.
The closest I got was Mrs. Bishop – the ghost of the previous occupant of Kensington, and a distant relative of Joseph’s. She seemed like she was probably an interesting lady. She tried during her own lifetime some 100 years before our heroes arrived to conquer the Grimlock, but clearly she did not succeed.
I found all of the other characters to be pretty flat. I wish the book was longer so that maybe they could have been fleshed out a little further. Although I have to imagine that if this was what we had by book two in the series, maybe additional length wouldn’t have changed anything. It seemed like Sophie wanted one thing: Joseph’s love. Joseph at least had two motivations: Sophie’s safety and killing the Grimlock. Garrett and Elsie, despite figuring heavily into the storyline received very little attention.
Here’s a spot where added length would have been really beneficial: tell me more about what it was like for Elsie, being all stuck up inside herself with the Grimlock! I bet that would have made for some interesting reading – I can’t imagine she just calmly took it. There had to have been some internal battling going on. That could have provided some much needed meat to what was otherwise a pretty bare-bones story.
About the Author:
Darcy is the USA Today Bestselling author of Hunted, The Haunting of Ashburn House, Craven Manor, and more than a dozen horror and suspense titles.
She lives on the Central Coast of Australia with her family, cats, and a garden full of herbs and vegetables.
Darcy loves forests, especially old-growth forests where the trees dwarf anyone who steps between them. Wherever she lives, she tries to have a mountain range close by.
Rating:
Ultimately, I just wanted more story. I feel like House of Secrets had a lot more that wanted to be told than ultimately was.
House of Secrets By Darcy Coates Poisoned Pen Press ISBN: 9781728221755 Published: May 5, 2020 Paperback, E-book, Audio 169 Pages Author's Website
