While I enjoyed Ezekiel Boone's trilogy, the writing has noticeably improved with the release of The Mansion. I loved the slow buildup of the plot, the well rounded characters and the stunning climax. Boone has successfully written a standalone novel. Highly recommended.

A horror story about a haunted mansion, murder and AI gone rogue.

All the elements for a great horror story were there but for me, this story fell a bit flat. Mostly because I didn't enjoy the characters. But that character connection isn't important to every reader so I'm sure there will be many that will really enjoy this one.

Also, the inner monologues were endless. And paragraphs were sooooo long. Even spanning a full page. I'm not a fan of that type of writing.

Technology going rogue is always a concern I have in real life so this subject matter is pretty cool and I'm truly surprised there aren't more fiction books with this theme.

This book was different then I was thinking it would be. It took me a couple chapters or so to really get into reading it, but once it got interesting to me I couldn’t put the book down. It was creepy, weird, cool and I absolutely loved it. The were a few times I was extremely shocked at the language the character used, but I can see why it was used. It was extremely creative. I got some major the shining vibes from the novel and I loved it. I felt it was more a sci-fi genre then a horror one but it worked really well together.

Quite good. It took me a while to really get into the story, but after it connected, it just FLOWED. Really enjoyed it.

I really loved this book in a new to me author. The characters and location really and to the story. I can't wait to read the next one. This book keeps you guessing until the end.

A modern take on the haunted house story, The Mansion by Ezekiel Boone subscribes to the idea that more is more. As our protagonist is invited to the high tech, AI powered estate that a former friend and colleague is engineering, we encounter all manner of spooky and unsettling elements. Not to mention the creepy twins who come into play. I enjoyed the 2019 reinvention of a haunted house but found the regular explanations of our brave narrator's feeling redundant. I was grateful for the scares but struggled with the pacing.

I really loved Boone's Hatching series and loved the premise of The Mansion, but unfortunately, I didn't love the execution. I felt like this book was a little longer than it needed to be and the build-up took forever; I kept waiting for the story to kick into gear, but didn't really feel like I got the big reveal.

who needs giant carnivorous spiders when you have a haunted house, an AI gone rogue, spooky twins, unresolved grudges, and murrrrderrrrrrr?

This was easily on of the best books I read in 2018. Ezekiel Boon is a master at giving reads just enough to suck them in but not enough that it ruins the suspense.

The Mansion by Ezekiel Boone, author of the Hatching trilogy is the tale of lost love and bitter friendship and the remains of a home that binds them all. The Mansion is tale of a haunted house and of haunted souls.

"...Billy tapped his fingers on the table and then nodded. 'First thing in the morning,' you'll take me to see Nellie?'
'First thing in the morning,' Shawn said. He stood up from the table ready to go, but Billy stopped him.
'Just tell me,' Billy said. 'You've cracked it, but here I am. I'm the only one who can help. That's what you're saying. So why, exactly, am I here? What is it you need to do?'
'Call it an exorcism, if you like.'
'An exorcism?'
'Let's just say there's a ghost in the machine..."

Shawn Eagle and Billy Stafford were once the very best of friends. Two college buddies who sequestered themselves in a tiny cabin outside of Shawn's family home, an abandoned and crumbling mansion, to develop a revolutionary new computer system they named Eagle Logic. But the two young programmers fell out and Shawn bought out Billy's share of Eagle Logic for penance of what it would eventually be worth. Shawn went on to become one of the richest and most influential men in the world and Billy fell into addiction and depression. Now, with Billy deep in debt and unable to hold onto a job, Shawn has come calling with a proposition. Because Shawn and Billy were working on much more than Eagle Logic when they were locked away in the cabin. They were working on Nellie. An advanced AI program that will destroy anything else on the market.

Shawn has rebuilt the family mansion and installed Nellie into it. Only Nellie is having glitches and Shawn believes that Billie, the only person besides him who knows the intricacies of the program, is the only person clean it up. But there have been other things going on at the mansion. Things that cannot be explained away by a computer program.

"...What do you mean?' Billy asked.
'There's more blood than steel in this place,' the man said. 'Seven dead in the building process, four of them in one accident, but still, seven men gone. That's not counting the hurt. There's a reason Eagle's paying extra on top of the isolation pay. And there's a reason Eagle's had to bring in so many workers from the outside. We've all heard the stories. This place has a history that's hard to ignore..."

Billy agrees to Shawn's offer and soon Billy and his wife move into the mansion where Billy can work with Nellie while it is in operation. But it isn't long before Billy and Nellie begin to become attached to one another. Nellie knows Billie's secrets and everyone else's as well. It knows about his addictions, and Shawn's family history and about the third member of their party when they had first isolated themselves in the cabin to work on Eagle Logic. The third member who disappeared and was never heard from again.

The Mansion is a blend of genres, some horror and some science fiction. Though for anyone who owns a smart phone or has Alexa in their home right now, the science is not quite so fictional. It also borrows from other classics of the past. The most obvious being 2001: A Space Odyssey and the interaction between Hal and the inhabitants of the space station. But there is also a sense of a haunted house vibe throughout this novel, the evils of the past that have happened in the mansion coming back to claim another victim.

But that is where The Mansion lost me, this blending of the genres, because it never really becomes one or the other. Is Nellie haunted or is she just making a logical decision and the acts of violence and imprisonment are just the program's way of handling the situation. It is, as revealed toward the end, working to right a wrong. To fix the past. To clean up the mess the humans created.

The secrets of Shawn's family and his past seem a bit strange in that a man who has become so famous and so rich (think Bill Gates) could keep so much evil quiet. I'm pretty sure TMZ would have unearthed all those murders and sex slaves in the dungeons under the mansion long ago.

Then there is Tanaka, the third in their group who went into seclusion with Shawn and Billy and was never heard from again. With a secret that big, it seems implausible that Billie would have ever become destitute. He could have held that over Shawn's head forever and extorted a very nice livelihood.

Then there are Billy's twin nieces. Two little girls who have some kind of psychic power. REDRUM. REDRUM.

The Mansion borrows too much from classics of the two genres and it leaves with the end result of lacking originality overall. It is a bland blend. Never really scary enough to be a haunted house and never really revealing in the way technology poses the morality questions of not only can we, but should we.

Ezekiel Boone is a very good writer and the Mansion is a good book. It just isn't as good as I thought it would be coming from this author.

You can find this review and all of my others over at www.readbookrepeat.wordpress.com

Billy is a recovering alcoholic. Him and his wife, Emily, live in poverty, drowning under the debts that Billy has built up over the years. Things weren't always like this though. There was a time when Billy knew that he'd be a billionaire, that everyone would know his name, and that he would never want for anything in life. Back when he was just out of college, Billy and his friend Shawn stayed in a rundown groundskeeper's cottage the shared the grounds of Eagle Mansion, Shawn's family's heritage. It was here that the idea for Eagle Logic, and something more advanced, came to light. But when Emily came into the picture, ultimately leaving the grounds with Billy, with the promise that if anything ever came of Eagle Logic, he would get his share, that's when things took a turn for the worst. Now Shawn is back, he has a prototype of a programme set up in the refurbished Eagle Mansion, but there's some bugs, and Billy is the only person he knows that can possibly get rid of them. Rekindling some semblance of their past friendship, Shawn pleads his case, with Billy accepting. However, the bugs in the machine seem to be something more than just glitches, a ghost in the machine, perhaps?

I love a good horror story. I love a good ghost story. This had the promise of both, with a bit of a techie twist thrown in, I loved the draw of that difference. Sure, we've had movies, aptly named "The ghost in the machine", but it's still a fresh sort of idea to me. I normally read traditionally haunting stories, so this was a pleasant jaunt into a bit of a different area than normal, for me.

Straight of the bat, this story is a slow burner. And by slow burner, I mean, the opening of the story is Billy meeting Shawn at his office to discuss the opportunity that Shawn has for him, this isn't the slow part. There is probably a whole chapter that just outlines how much Billy hates Shawn, and what he is fantasising of doing to him, namely, punch him in the face. I'm talking PAGES of this. So while this was nearly a deal breaker for me, I hate DNFing a book so early on in reading it, so I pushed through, and I'm glad that I did. Just be prepared for a whole bunch of unnecessary stuff that somehow feels necessary after the fact, if that makes sense? So once I'd gotten through the chapter or two of how much Billy hates Shawn, I had a real sense for who Billy was as a person as well as a crystal clear view on his and Shawn's past relationship and where they now stood. Hence the 'unnecessary necessary' comment. There was a fair amount of content that I felt could have been edited out to make the story move faster and have a better flow, but I feel like small nuances would have been lost, such as the crystal clear view of Billy and Shawn's past relationship. I think another round of editing and some tough love from said editor, would have worked wonders for the story.

I love a creepy story, as you've probably worked out from my opening comments above, this was also a very slow burn in that department too. The parts that were creepy, we really well written and they gave me definite creep factor, it was the lack of these that drove my rating down. While there's small instances of said 'haunting' happening from around 40% in, they are few and far between, the main chunk of 'haunting' happens in the last 20% of the book. So it's a massive build up, to a not terribly climactic near ending, that we end up with. Up until about 50% of the way through the book, I was honestly wondering what I was going to rate this book at, because I just didn't know how I felt about it. After finishing it, I did enjoy the story, I just wish there was more creepy and less blathering on about things I guess.

The characters were well written, and we get a definite sense of who each person is and their personalities which is great. Billy annoyed me a lot. Look, I can understand how life shattering it would be to have your deserved billions ripped out from under you after an old friend renegs on a promise, but come on. What did he honestly think would happen when he left with the man's girlfriend? As one character we meet says "it's always about a girl, isn't it?" or at least, something along that line anyway. Emily was a good character, and Shawn was written well, though I wanted to slap him a lot of the time. I was actually curious about the events surrounding Emily's twin nieces and was surprised when they actually got some screen time, that was good.

One thing I couldn't help noticing throughout this read was the similarities to Stephen King's The Shining. It's one of my favourite movies (the 4 hour long TV mini-movie version, NOT the Kubrick version), and the book was just as fantastic. I noticed a lot of similarities. Recovering alcoholic agreeing to stay at a place that has the possibility of being snowed in and therefore inaccessible to outside help - check; a flash scene where the character is running through a haunted old mansion being chased by their alcoholic father who is screaming at him to "take his medicine" - check; characters questioning their own mental faculties and sanity because an outside source is whispering in their ears - check. These were the main parallels that I came across. It didn't ruin the book for me, it was just an observation. I feel like the 'take your medicine' line was a bit on the nose as that is literally what the father in the shining is screaming at Danny when he's chasing him down the hallway, but, it worked I guess.

The programme itself was written well as a character. The 'haunting' was written exceptionally well I just wish that there was more of that in the actual story rather than a huge build up to a kind of satisfying ending. I'd happily give this author another go, I rather enjoyed the writing, I just wish there was a bit harsher editing going on with it. If you like a slow burn horror story that has a technological twist, give this one a go, you may like it.

First off thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for allowing me to read an arc.

Now what can I say well I loved it. But I knew I would I read Skitter and knew that anything he wrote I would read. The story was creepy. and atmospheric. I felt like I was there. What I didn’t like was he kept throwing out names such as google apple etc when describing the company and all that they accomplished. Once was enough. But besides all that a definite good read but don’t read it night!

A dark fairy tale thriller that had me hooked from the very first page. Explores motherhood and myth. A favorite read of the year so far.

Wow this was a good book. I could not read it fast enough. The story focuses on good friends from college - Shawn Eagle and Billy Stafford, who took to a cabin on property that Shawn's family own, to create something that would put them on the map. However, only Shawn ends up making millions, while Billy left with Shawn's girlfriend Emily. Fast forward and you find Billy and Emily living hand to mouth, after Billy squandered his money on alcohol and drugs. He is sober for almost 2 years when Shawn asks him to come and see him at Eagle Logic headquarters. He is flown there, put up in a nice hotel and brought to Shawn's office where he wants nothing else but to punch the guy in the mouth. However, Shawn wants to hire him to work the kinks out of Nellie -- their first project together that was later abandoned for Eagle Logic, that was used to put all of the other companies -- Apple, Microsoft, etc. to shame. Shawn flies Billy out of their old stomping grounds where he has re-built the town and the run down mansion that overshadowed the shack they lived in together after college, to show him where he has installed Nellie, the next personal assistant, that will run your home and take care of things before you even realize they need to be taken care of. There are some glitches in the program, which Shawn needs Billy to work out. Thus begins a shift in their relationship as they once again work together...is Nellie a work of art or something that nightmares are made out of. It may be hard to tell at first but stick around, as things become clearer.... a well written novel that fans of Stephen King will love.

Before reading The Skittering by this author, I was full of anticipation! At the time, I really needed a good "creature feature." It was...good. It just seemed to take a while for readers to get to the "good stuff." Before reading The Mansion, I had the same excitement. I'm thinking it's going to be this cool techno/horror/thriller hybrid with some kind of Siri or Alexa thing gone wrong. Yes, it is. But...like in The Skittering, the pacing was uneven, and it took a while to get things moving. If about 1/4 to 1/3 of the book were removed, we'd be closer to a really taut novel!

Had a great storyline. Got caught up in finishing a degree to post the review on this but thought it was a very interesting read!

The description of this book really pulled me in, and sadly I wanted to love it so much more than I did. Just not paced well for me.

There is a sequence near the middle of ‘The Mansion’ that encapsulates for me what good horror writing is. It’s a flashback in which one of the main characters finally confronts his abusive father. It’s tense, believable, emotionally engaging to an almost uncomfortable degree and terrifying. As good as it was, I almost wish that passage wasn’t in the book, because it highlights the weaknesses in the rest of the novel.
The story itself is kind of a cross between Stephen King’s ‘The Shining’ and Dean Koontz’s ‘Demon Seed’. Down on his luck, recovering alcoholic Billy Stafford gets hired by his ex-partner, billionaire tech guru Shawn Eagle, to try and fix the bugs in the latest version of an AI they created years before. The catch is that Billy has to do the fixing in a vast, remote mansion that Shawn is rebuilding. The mansion is on the site of the cabin the two worked together in after college and harbours secrets from that time. The AI, named Nellie, is an Alexa-like virtual assistant that inhabits the building.
So yeah, ‘The Shining’ meets ‘Demon Seed’ pretty much sums it up. Ezekial Boone even throws in some creepy psychic twin girls for good measure (but little effect). Being able to compare a book to other, more famous works, is never a good thing and it does ‘The Mansion’ no favours at all.
However, the main problem the book has is that it’s longer than it needs to be and painfully slow as a result. There’s way too much back story that doesn’t really go anywhere and adds nothing to the overall plot. I’d much rather have read a stripped down version that got to the point quicker. Another problem is that, aside from the sequence I mentioned at the start, the book just isn’t scary. When asked why his sequel to ‘The Exorcist’ was such a flop, director John Boorman quipped, “I guess I didn’t throw enough Christians to the lions.” That’s certainly true of ‘The Mansion’ as well. There’s lots of build up but little meat and the lack of incident makes the whole thing drag more than a book like this should.
If it sounds like I have a real downer on the book, that’s because I thought the concept had real promise. As a kid I read a comic called ‘The House of Daemon’ which had a similar idea at its core and I loved it (in fact it might be the first horror I read). For all its faults, though, ‘The Mansion’ is well written, has some memorable moments and believable characters. It just forgets to be fun.

Content warnings: domestic abuse, rape, alcoholism, child abuse, incest

I struggle with reviews when I have mixed feelings about a book. I generally like to post only positive reviews on my blog. If I enjoyed a book but I have a few issues with it, I’ll still write a post about it, but I agonize over any negative remarks. If my feelings are so mixed that I can’t decide what to do, I’ll ask myself this question: “Would you recommend this book to a friend whose opinion you care about?” When I posed this question to myself about The Mansion, my answer was: No. I’d tell them just to read The Shining or 2001: A Space Odyssey instead.

Racism and misogyny run rampant throughout this book, particularly in the first 20% or so, and the evil Alexa part of the story really only picks up speed in the last 20% of the book. I didn’t have as big a problem as some other reviewers did with the pacing or the amount of time spent on character development, but I do understand their frustration with the relative lack of actual haunting going on in this haunted house story. One of the most intriguing plot points – when a character spots a mysterious women through a window of the titular haunted mansion but is told by Evil Alexa that she’s just imagining things – is dropped completely, never to be mentioned again.

To be fair, there were aspects of the book that I enjoyed. There was some body horror that still has me squirming in my seat, and there were a few moments when I was well and truly creeped out. However, I can’t in good conscience recommend this book with such blatant racism and misogyny. If those prejudices weren’t present, I might be able to overlook the fact that the book doesn’t sufficiently distinguish itself from its influences. (“Overlook” may be a Freudian slip.) As it stands, though, I have to be honest and say that I wouldn’t recommend this title.

I greatly appreciate Atria and NetGalley providing a free copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

What happens when two friends, who are on the eve of a technological breakthrough that will change life for the masses, both fall in love with the same girl? What happens when years later that technological breakthrough needs both of these friends to finish what they started?

Billy Stafford and Shawn Eagle are longtime friends and tech/engineering gurus. After an ugly disagreement, they haven’t spoken in years until an old project brings them back together. Old wounds are reopened and bizarre family secrets are revealed which boil over into a wild, twisty, creepy ride.

The Mansion by Ezekiel Boone is a creepy, well-written book with well-developed characters, great plot twists and a great, sometimes mirthful, prose. You’ll love this, very relevant, often scary read.

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley for my honest review. Opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own.