my thoughts about The House Next Door, by Anne Rivers Siddons...

 Hmm, how did I find this book... for the life of me, right now, I cannot remember how I stumbled upon this book. I am pretty sure that it was not from a youtube book reviewer (the way I have been finding most of my recommendations lately)... gosh this is gonna bug me until I figure it out... dang!

Well, I fell in love with this lady's writing within the first few pages. She does something that I find takes more power of concentration to keep track of than I am used to exerting... and this could have turned into a deal breaker if the story had not been so captivating. She has a LOT of side characters that play very important roles in the story, and it's hard to keep track of exactly who is who, and to follow their trails of involvement between the developing scenery of the story. I was able to keep good enough track of the most important side characters, so yeah, it worked out just fine.

The one thing I felt most dissatisfied by was that the source of the "evil" in the story was not explained well enough for my liking. I know that was her intent, because she used subterfuge all through the story to keep us wondering what it was, but then at the end she just blamed it on one person without giving any depth of explanation as to how/why he channeled this "evil"...

There, I'm not going to describe to you in any depth what the story is about, I'm just writing this for my own sake as a bookmark of the books I've been reading lately and how they affect me and my desire to write like these people do.

Would I ever be able to write with such explicit depth of character development, with intensely deep conversations going on between all of these different personalities like she does? No, probably not, because I don't have conversations like this in my own real life. What I'm most impressed by is her ability to create the tension of underlying terror by NOT utilizing any motifs of literary terror. No one in this story believes in the supernatural. No one ever suggests that a standard type of "haunting" is happening. No one ever points at the "former inhabitants of the land cursing the property" as an excuse. Nope. Nothing like that at all even comes close to explaining what goes on. And for how well trained I've become to look for and expect explanations like that, I'm dumbfounded by how much the story scenario feels like any of those standard tropes could have been an explanation. So bravo to you, ARS! I don't know if I'll look into anything else she's ever written, or wrote since this book... because of the trouble I have with untangling all the personalities and trailing conversations, I might feel like passing...

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My next book I started reading last night is, THE RITUAL, by Adam Neville... there's a movie that I've been a huge fan of that I discovered before I ever knew there was also a book... there is a huge discrepancy between the way the book starts to the way the movie starts, and now I don't know how they became such different stories. In the book there are 4 main characters. In the movie there are 5 main characters. So I'm waiting to see if this 5th, missing character's arc is going to be introduced later??? Weird that there is no mention of him at all yet when in the movie, he's the entire central reason for the story to happen at all... Weirdddd