The Haunting of Ashburn House

This is the third book in a row I’ve read by Darcy Coates and so far the one I had the most trouble getting into. To warn others, this is not so much a ghost story or a story about a haunted house as it is about a curse of the undead—not my usual cup of tea.

It wasn’t bad, though. I started to really turn pages towards the last third. The mystery finally begins to unfold, quite predictably, but my opinion is that the “Missive” chapter was still an extremely satisfying reveal, and Coates never fails to please me with a happy ending that contains heartwarming, unlikely friendships.

Unfortunately, the pace in the first two-thirds is just a drag, and in the beginning I wasn’t very sure if I wanted to finish the book at all. Adrienne, sadly, I just found very uninteresting, and the exposition was not very intriguing or even creepy compared to other Coates novels.

Ashburn House is basically a zombie/survival novel for the first 2/3s, which can be nice when you’re in the mood for it, but I was expecting another creepy haunted house story like the ones I’d read before it. I didn’t really feel particularly invested in Adrienne. Out of all the protagonists I’ve read from Coates’ novels so far, I felt Adrienne was the most underdeveloped.

Nor did I feel particularly thrilled or chilled by the play-by-play chronicling of her hiding in her house from the danger that lurked outside Ashburn. It wasn’t really suspenseful. Adrienne spent too much of her time doing ordinary or repetitive things. In fact, it felt like she spent much of the novel falling asleep with her cat in the lounge room, eating instant noodles, running out of kindling, and contemplating hypothetical escape plans. Lots of sitting and waiting; not much action driving the story forward.

I didn’t find the enemy particularly scary either, once she’d fully revealed herself (I thought she was creepiest at a distance, when we still didn’t quite know what she was). In the whole book, my favorite character was probably mirror Edith.

This is exactly what I want from a haunted house story. A good main character to root for, a cat that doesn't die, slow build of creepiness, a friendly ghost, and a happy-ish ending . Highly recommend if you don't like super disturbing and depressing horror stories, but still want something pretty creepy while not too gross. I did find some bits a little goofy, even funny, but that only enhanced the experience for me.

Not the greatest book. I feel like this wasn’t even particularly spooky.

I enjoyed this. It was creepy but I, a HUGE wimp, did the audiobook and while I was creeped out I wasn't terrified. I loved the cat, the carved messages, the attic, and especially the portraits. It kept me entertained and listening. I liked the ending a lot.

It was fine, but I don’t understand the hype for it. It was ridiculously slow, and the 3 stars is generous. I’d give a 2.5, and that’s mainly for the last 15 percent of the book. Once things actually got going it was kind of predictable. As soon as it was revealed that there was a weird corpse version and a mirror version of Edith I was like “oh, it’s probably twins. That would be really dumb.” And I literally had to put the book down for a minute when it was revealed that it was in fact twins.

Also the writing in general was kind of clunky and kind of hard to follow at points. I found myself backing up and re reading some pages just to figure out positioning of characters, and things like that. It isn’t a long book but took days to finish just because it didn’t hold my attention super well.