House of Fear was a Frightful Bore

Full disclosure: I could not finish this collection. I got about halfway through before doing the smart thing and giving up. Honestly, the main reason I gave up on this is that I wasn’t scared. At all. Not even a little bit. I have a hyperactive imagination, can be easily jumpy and so I am pretty easy to scare. And yet in this supposedly scary story collection, the bravest thing I had to do was DNF it.

Yet since I wasted enough time with it, I thought I might share them with you anyway. Welcome, then, to my very first DNF review… where everything is unsatisfactory and incomplete.

To say this was a mixed bag would be too generous a description, because too often the same issues plagued these stories. One of the main issues that occurred time and again with this book was that there was much too much detail. Now, a little mundanity I can understand, creating a nice contrast in a scary story, but “I need fairy liquid” while going grocery shopping (and the whole darn grocery list) is too much. Honestly, too much information is always an issue, but this was especially noticeable in short stories. Far too many of these were convoluted instead of atmospheric, weird instead of intriguing, and mostly *yawn* instead of *ahhh*!

There were also too many stories- too many for me going into detail for all of them (especially since none of them could keep my attention for long) though I will address a few. “Objects in Dreams May Be Closer Than You Think” felt like it was trying too hard to be clever and didn’t deliver the promised chills. “Pied a Terre” was the only one I found genuinely creepy and had a strong, convincing voice. “An Injustice” was the last story I read and was alleged (from other reviews) to be good, so I powered through it, but there was a political vein to it (cos why not, everything needs to be political nowadays) that was just too meh to be interesting.

Since I didn’t finish this it wouldn’t be fair to give it any bananas, so I guess I shall declare this “the end”. The one great thing about this was that it inspired me to write a short story for the first time in *years* …. One I might share on here, if I feel like it 😉 (yes odd that sometimes blah stories are more inspiring than the ones that make you think “I could never do that”)

So how easily can you DNF books? And what was the last book you gave up on? Let me know in the comments!