The September House

Yeah, I was not a fan of this book! It was ok the 1st beginning chapters.. Then I totally got bored! The last final chapters were better than the entire book. The narrator did a grest job overall. I didn't get the hype of this book..

This is one of those books that somehow got more interesting to me after I finished it. The first half was a SLOW burn. I kept wandering toward other books and having to come back. Then somewhere around Chapter 13, something clicked and suddenly I had a full mental corkboard going. 😂 The rules. The ghosts. Margaret’s memory. The basement. September. The history of the house. I was tracking EVERYTHING. And honestly? Trying to figure out what was actually happening became one of my favorite parts of reading this book. Then the final act went from slow burn to absolute chaos. Fast, grotesque, intense, occasionally overwhelming, and completely impossible to ignore. I was confused, fascinated, uncomfortable, horrified…and absolutely paying attention. But what changed this book for me happened after I finished it. The longer I sat with the story, the more I realized the haunting wasn’t really the scariest part. Margaret has learned the rules. She knows what makes things worse, what to avoid, what she can tolerate, and how to make it through. At some point those haunted-house rules started feeling a lot more like survival strategies. Even the slower beginning looked different afterward. Margaret treats impossible things as normal, and somewhere along the way, I started accepting them as normal too. The ghosts feel normal. The living people are the horror. That realization made me appreciate this book far more than I initially did. It didn’t erase what didn’t work for me. I still wanted more development from the supernatural mythology, more resolution for some of the threads I spent the book tracking, and more room to breathe after the final act. Some of the gore also crossed from effective into excessive for me. So no, sitting with it didn’t magically turn my 6/10 into an 8. I didn’t change my rating. I changed the way I understood it. And somehow, that feels much more interesting. 🖤

This book does not live up to the hype, unfortunately. I was expecting a lot more from it. It felt very repetitive after a while. Also, the author did something I was not used to where the main character was not an unreliable narrator, but she was actually a manipulative narrator. She only shared what she wanted the reader to know at any given moment. Then when another character questions her reality, she suddenly remembers something that was never previously mentioned. It all felt too convenient and then ended in a rush that was somehow also repetitive.

WOW! This book! I don’t know where to begin. This is certainly not your typical haunted house tale. And I really didn’t expect to laugh hysterically at the end. That being said, this is not at all a funny book. It’s horrifying and gory and bloody and mystifying. Unreliable narrator is an understatement and actually does the narrator a disservice. You’ll have to read it to find out for yourself what is real and what is reality.

This book was a little slower to build up momentum than I had expected, and in fact I almost put it down about a third of the way through. I’m so glad I didn’t, however, because from there things picked up with a vengeance! The ending is nothing short of awesome. This book really, really surprised me—overall it kind of has the feel of something like Burnt Offerings, if Burnt Offerings had been written by Grady Hendrix. Great book for spooky season; give it a read!