A mysterious house on the moors, seems like a perfect place to start over, but things start to slowly descent into spookiness and weirdness.

In this book we meet couple Freddie and Emily. Emily just survived a big accident along with a sepsis poisoning and other things. She wants to recover. She wants to just relax. But right from the bat strange things happen. Is it the sepsis? Is the trauma she is still working through? Or is it a ghost? The house was properly spooky and I loved seeing what happened. From eternal cold, to windows opening, to creaky sounds in the upstairs room, to footprints and more. It was a delight and I was reading it with goosebumps. The author definitely knows how to write an atmosphere. I was just dreading those evening times along with Emily. Yes, I also wanted to know what is up, but on the other hand I wouldn’t mind just hiding, haha.

There is also a small town nearby (with a small bookclub which I loved), various characters we meet along the way (Sally and Joe were the most interesting ones), friends from London.

Normally with books that feature POVs of unlikable characters (in this case Freddie who is just an asshole even before the house) I drop them pretty fast. My characters don’t need to be 100% likeable, but I want at least 80-90% likeability. But we see that the house is affecting these two. Freddie was already a freaking nope and became worse and we saw through his POVs that he feels better away from the house (at least at first) and that he mention there are bees in his head clouding him. But Emily, well, OK, Emily also wasn’t the best character and that is solely because of what she did for that promotion, everyone who knows me knows I DETEST characters who do that shit. But for most of the book Emily at least was normal. She was just trying to make things right, try to recover from the accident, try figure out if she was going crazy or not. But as the story moves on we see her changing. She is considering things she wouldn’t consider. Acts differently. It was quite interesting to see how the house affected people.

But while I could understand that the characters may have worsened due to what the house does to people… it didn’t make for the easiest read and at points I started dreading reading the book. My rating also suffered. When I started and the characters weren’t totally insufferable I had fun with the book and wanted to give it a 5 star. By the end of my reading? I am still shifting between 3.5 and 4 stars. I just wanted to punch people SO HARD. They were just so insufferable, so annoying, so fucking idiotic. Each one acting like they were much better than the other. Good grief.

There is also a raven POV and while I liked the creativity and the break it provided from the main chapters, at times I just didn’t see the point of it all.

I loved the twists though, get to know the history of the house, see what the house can do and what it is doing. I was just gasping and squeeing because it was that good. I am glad that I soldiered on despite wanting to drop it. Because WOW. I had many ideas of what we would get but this? Nah. Heck nah?

The ending and how everything came together and all that happened in those last pages? WOW. That sure was a ride.

All in all, despite the unlikeable characters, the things that some characters did that I hate, this book was definitely spooky and I am happy I have read it.