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A review by bagel_cm
Audrey's Door by Sarah Langan
2.0
Lots of Rosemary's Baby and The Shining influence
Pros
• Blurred border between waking and dream states
• Interesting use of family history of mental illness/neglect and heroine with mental illness
•The push and pull between Saraub and Audrey was a nice weaved into the story of her "descent into madness" (duh duh duh)
• some genuinely creepy imagery - skeleton man with arms as long as his legs skittering across the floor, build the door out of what you love, etc.
Cons
• A little too confusing at times, the use of the 'red ants' seemed kind of muddled or unclear, overused; Audrey's friend Jayne seemed weird as a reader but ended up being another innocent targeted by the building(?)
• The other tenants being used by The Breviary as part of its family didn't come together fully and felt rushed towards the end - this is where a lot of the Rosemary's Baby stuff came out - I thought interesting and frightening but not done quite right here
Suprisingly, this felt like maybe the author started out writing " Literature with a capital L" then somehow got lost and ended up finishing it as a genre horror story (as much as I hate hewing to those categories) - I thought the use of mental illness was really interesting because it was fleshed out more than one usually sees in things. I don't know the ins-and-outs of OCD but it was brought up throughout the story in a novel (to me) way.
Not super scary, a couple of scenes that were a little unsettling if you're reading somewhere by yourself at night.
Pros
• Blurred border between waking and dream states
• Interesting use of family history of mental illness/neglect and heroine with mental illness
•The push and pull between Saraub and Audrey was a nice weaved into the story of her "descent into madness" (duh duh duh)
• some genuinely creepy imagery - skeleton man with arms as long as his legs skittering across the floor, build the door out of what you love, etc.
Cons
• A little too confusing at times, the use of the 'red ants' seemed kind of muddled or unclear, overused; Audrey's friend Jayne seemed weird as a reader but ended up being another innocent targeted by the building(?)
• The other tenants being used by The Breviary as part of its family didn't come together fully and felt rushed towards the end - this is where a lot of the Rosemary's Baby stuff came out - I thought interesting and frightening but not done quite right here
Suprisingly, this felt like maybe the author started out writing " Literature with a capital L" then somehow got lost and ended up finishing it as a genre horror story (as much as I hate hewing to those categories) - I thought the use of mental illness was really interesting because it was fleshed out more than one usually sees in things. I don't know the ins-and-outs of OCD but it was brought up throughout the story in a novel (to me) way.
Not super scary, a couple of scenes that were a little unsettling if you're reading somewhere by yourself at night.