The call is coming from inside the house. Wait… the call is the house itself?

Ezekiel Boone’s The Mansion is a haunted house thriller influenced heavily by the tech industry. It follows the story of Billy Stafford, the former co-founder of Eagle Technology, a global giant that combines Apple and Google and always searches for more. While is ex-partner, Shawn Eagle, walked away with billions, Billy left with the girl and a bad case of alcoholism that has plunged him deeply into debt. When a call from Shawn comes, offering a substantial financial reward if Billy can just iron out the kinks in their new proprietary system, Nellie, he’s eager to jump at the chance.



Needless to say, Nellie is not what she seemed. Boone takes elements of the classic haunted house and twists them. Shawn Eagle has a dark background filled with deaths, possibly murders, but there are no traditional ghosts within the book. At the same time, Nellie isn’t a true AI- or is she? It was something I was left slightly confused with by the end of the book. The characters insist that Nellie isn’t an AI, but to my uneducated perspective she clearly was. If it walks like an AI and it talks like an AI, does it follow that it has to be one?



Still, I liked The Mansion. I’m not normally big on techno-thrillers, but because this followed such a traditional haunted house/horror narrative, it was easy for me to fall into the story, despite the lack of traditional spirits and chills. I didn’t necessarily find it thrilling, per se, though I did enjoy the hints of supernatural that pepper the story, the clear nods to legends like Stephen King.



My largest complaint is that for a story that focuses so specifically on a house, the story of the house was left curiously unresolved. There’s an element of Chekhov’s gun here; we hear many characters making allusions to creepy, terrible things that have happened in the mansion’s history, but we never really learn. Or rather, we do, but it’s quickly explained away within a few sentences in a revelation that lacks satisfaction for how much and how long the hints persisted. Given that the ending relies heavily on understanding the house’s history, I wasn’t thrilled by the end.



All in all, I did enjoy The Mansion, but I felt it had potential it still needed to live up to. The characterizations are strong, which can be rarely in a horror novel, and I’d honestly recommend it based on those alone. They’re pretty decent portraits of nuanced, deeply flawed individuals who are struggling to make ends meet the only way they know how, constantly running from a past they have to confront.



Happy October everyone!

Not Your Average Haunted House

The Mansion is a complex story that has melded the old-fashioned haunting with 21st century smart-house technology. It's got supernatural elements, but there's also some very creepy artificial intelligence. I've never read a book that combines things in this way and the result was excellent. I was plenty scared.

The author’s handling of both the computer tech and parapsychological scenarios is accurate and believable. The story simmers with dread from the start. It progresses from a college-aged friendship broken by a love triangle, building into a sustained crescendo of all kinds of horror, terror, and murder, with twists the reader won't expect. It's a great read!

I had this book on my tbr list but bumped it up when a fellow reader raved about this book. Thus, I could not want to read this book. The story started out fine. The author did a good job of describing the dynamic relationship that Billy, Shawn, and Emily shared together. It was a bit of a tangled web.

In the beginning I got an idea of just what type of AI, Nellie was when the construction workers were sharing stories of incidents that had taken place while building the mansion. However, there was not enough Nellie for me. She appeared when Billie arrived in the house. The way she interacted with him versus with Shawn; did tell me that she had a "crush" on Billie. Yet, other mysterious events did not transpire until later in the book. I do agree that the idea of an AI controlled house is not ideal. Example: I read an article where an Alexa device turned on by itself and started playing music. The problem is that it was about 2 am and the owners were not home. The police were called where they broke the door down because no one was home.

This book for me did not hit the "sweet" spot like my friend. However, there was something there within the pages of this book that did have me intrigued. I would read another book from this author.

After reading Ezekiel Boone's The Mansion, I don't think I will ever, ever, EVER purchase an Alexa for my house! When I read about this book on a friend's Instagram feed, I immediately knew I needed a copy of it. Who wouldn't love a book that involves a love triangle, a haunted mansion, and artificial intelligence? If that sounds like a lot of themes to tackle in one book, yes, you are probably right. However, somehow Boone makes it work for the most part. 

The book's central three characters are Billy, Shawn, and Erica. Shawn and Bill meet in college and become quick friends over their love of technology and coding. They set out to build an expansive artificial intelligence (AI) named "Nellie," devoting two whole years to making their dream a reality. To make it happen, they move out to a remote, dilapidated cabin on Shawn's family's property. The cabin is barely inhabitable, but they sacrifice comfort for the promise of wealth and Silicon Valley fame.

Emily is the girl in between the two men. She fell in love with Shawn while in college, eventually dropping out to help support Shawn in his pursuit of developing a revolutionary AI. She ends up living with Shawn and Billy in the cabin, cooking, cleaning, and tending to their needs as they throw themselves headfirst into coding Nellie. Unfortunately, things fall apart, and Emily ends up leaving Shawn for Billy. The project falls into despair, and the three don't see each other until nearly a decade later.

Flash forward to the present. Shawn is now a tech billionaire who, despite all his riches and fame, has yet to finish Nellie. Billy and Emily, who are now married, are broke and barely making ends meet. Shawn, who still is bitter that Emily left him for Billy, knows that the only way he can make Nellie come to life is to hire Billy. Shawn takes a risk and hires Billy to return to Nellie, which Shawn began to install at his family's historic mansion. Billy reluctantly accepts the challenge because he and Emily are nearly bankrupt and need the money. Shawn promises them the world if Billy can make Nellie work, so Emily and Billy move into the creepy mansion in hopes of a second chance at life.

My main critique of this book is that the characters' backstories took up most of the book (60%). The readers really didn't get to the gory, scary AI mansion stuff until the last 40% of the book. In fact, I would have probably read another 100 or so pages if the book included more about the mansion. Nonetheless, I kept reading because I was really into the characters and their motivations for returning to Nellie. The characters share really dark, depressing histories, which cloud their judgments and cause them to make poor decisions while trying to build Nellie. And if you're trying to build an AI in a human's image, do you really want these troubled young people creating Nellie?

Thank you to Ezekiel Boone, Atria Books/Simon & Schuster, and NetGalley for an advanced e-galley of The Mansion. This was the perfect spooky read for fall!

`I received a digital ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

"The Mansion" by Ezekiel Boone, is a perfect example of a wasted concept. When I received this book I was very excited. I was raised on SciFi horror, but have found it very rare to find this genre in books. Based on the cover, I was expecting just a general horror story. But upon reading the description, I was surprised to find that it was, in theory, not this. It was actually about an experimental house AI going wrong. Sign me up! A modern ghost story, without an actual ghost. HAL 9000 meets "House on Haunted Hill". This is exactly the style of book that needs to be written.

But that book isn't this book, that type story was not written. The story of "The Mansion" felt as though the author had an idea, but not enough substance for that idea, so it's filled with secondary and tertiary plots that are pointless, and the actual plot, the actual book's description is so poorly handled and barely touched on that it was frustrating.
The plot opens in Michael Crichton style, we follow Billy, a washed up, recovering alcoholic who is actually a brilliant programmer. He's estranged from his ex-best friend Shawn, who he parted ways with over a girl (and now Billy's wife) costing Billy everything. Shawn has taken Billy and his developments from college and became a billionaire, while Billy is a janitor. However Shawn wants to revisit an old project, one that was very much Billy's, and this is something he can't figure out, so despite their past, he brings Billy into the fold with the mission to make "Nellie" ,a house AI, their house AI, functional and ready for the public.
In true Crichton style, Nellie is currently implemented in Shawn's old family mansion, now fully renovated, in the middle of nowhere. Billy and his wife will be moving into this secluded mansion for Billy to work on Nellie, and get paid lots and lots of money.
Everything about this sounds great, foreboding and the opportunity for an unsettling modern "ghost" story. Paranormal isn't for everyone, but most people have the tingle of fear with the exponential level of advancement we've had with technology. Especially with how ingrained it is in our everyday life and the quicker we move toward an automated lifestyle. This makes this style of book perfect for the modern audience.
However, the author didn't commit, and this destroyed this book. A combination of not committing to his concept, amateurish writing, pointless subplots, vapid characters, and ham-handed delivery, this book falls completely flat.
The opening of this book drags on and introduces many of the author's amateurish fallbacks. Including dreadfully dull and long exposition (30% of this book, is just Billy learning that Nellie is still "alive" and discussion about him going to work on her). He uses a repetition that makes it feel even longer, the first 6% of this book was all about him hitting Shawn, and the author said this, over, and over, and over, again. We get it, he reaaaally wanted to punch Shawn. The author also does something, that many modern books are guilty of, and is a huge pet peeve of mine but probably won't bother most. He makes too many references to name brand things. This IMMEDIATELY ruins the longevity of a book, it dates it. I read A LOT of vintage writing, SciFi specifically and almost NEVER do they reference brands, you never see IBM or long gone brands. Sure Ommegang beer is a thing now, but in 15 years it could be long gone, and in 30 years, are people going to have to stop and look up this reference. This happens a lot, he references clothing brands, Google, Amazon, Apple (a current tech trifecta but will be laughable if one goes under someday). He's writing this book for right now, without any thought about the longevity, a good book will last a long time, and the style or language might date it a little bit, but brands date it instantly. This bugs me, especially when it could easily be replaced with "he was worth more than the top tech companies combined". The other thing that bugged me, was the chapter titles, they are horribly inconsistent and at times very childish, for example, Chapter 2's title was straight out of a Dianna Wynne Jone's book and was titled " In which Emily Wiggin's takes a nap". Terrible, terrible title, and the first of many boring and pointless chapters. To top that terrible chapter title, he ends that chapter with " She fell asleep right as Billy said-" and then finished the sentence at the beginning of the next chapter. This was such a children's book tactic, a picture book tactic. It was awful.
Emily...Billy's wife and her family were such a pointless part of this book. Emily is vapid, for someone who is established as an overachiever and intelligent, she spends the book being a stereotypical female. She reads romance novels, wants to write one but can't. But she's sexy and sexual and both men are obsessed with her, and dropped out of college to hang out with two boys in the woods, fell in love with both, but picked one. She's full of herself, easily bought out, and her feelings for Shawn after 10 years, while she states don't resurge, obviously do, because alllll she thinks about is if he's still into her. She plays a horribly weak, unfortunately, key role in this book.
Her family. feels like they belong in a different book, and are where you first see Boone's lack of commitment to his concept. Her twin nieces were conceived at the creepy mansion 7 years ago, and that made them have supernatural abilities. Their role is pointless, drawn out, and adds absolutely nothing to the plot. Yet way too much of this book is focused on them and Emily.
The other majority of this book is filled with a repetitive never-ending backstory to the mansion and Shawn. Continuing to take the plot away from the SciFi and into the realm of paranormal. It couldn't be a rogue AI, we have to have a creepy backstory to give it a reason to be rogue.
After all this, we have intermittent parts of the ACTUAL plot. Of Nellie, and Nellie is beyond underwhelming. Her parts read like a petulant teenager. Her "ghost in the machine" surfaces primarily as her ending her sentences with off-handed comments, showing she's not all she seems, promptly causing a character to say "what" and her to cover up by saying nothing, or a normal thing that sounds like the "unsettling thing". None of the things she says are actually unsettling by the way, It seriously read like " You're going to love it here. YOU"LL NEVER LEAVE." "What was that Nellie?" " I said, look at the leaves.". It was dreadful. Nothing ooky spooky happens, there is no slow build, nothing eerie, just a bunch of the AI muttering things, the twins not liking "Her" and then it escalates quickly. It seriously goes from harmless mutterings to a full-scale panic and assumption of "She'll never let us leave!". Literally with no other incidents happening. It's so rushed that the book is over before you know it. With an equally underwhelming climax, that made absolutely no sense. The actual AI part made up at maximum 15-20% of the book. The rest was filler. Filler that I think was supposed to make the finale impactful, but it didn't.
His dedication to making this a paranormal thing bogged down the whole book and stripped it of any meaningful story. It didn't succeed as a thriller, a horror, a scifi, a character drama... a story. it caused the plot to be incredibly disjointed. It left me underwhelmed and wishing for the story described in the summary. If Crichton was alive he would have rocked this plot, that man wasn't an amazing writer, but he knew how to handle exposition, science and tech, and thrills. You can be a fine writer (I haven't read Boone's other books, so this is up in the air for me) but that doesn't matter if you don't have a solid foundation and plan for your book. Which Boone absolutely didn't have.

If you're looking for a SciFi thriller, this is not it. If you're looking for a mediocre character drama, then maybe I'd suggest giving it a try, but there are plenty of other options out there. I wish he had given himself more time to suss out just what he wanted this book to be.

I'll admit I'm a guilty fan of the "haunted house" genre, but this one was special. A programmed mansion?? Not by ghosts, but via technical enhancements built into it by man? Intriguing! I loved the way the author managed to goad you into assigning the house a real personality of its own, with evil intent coming not from the typical ghosts, but from lumber and stone. Didn't take me long to read this one, and definitely looking forward to Boone's next offering!

If you're concerned that smart homes are a little too smart for their own good, then Ezekiel Boone would like you to read his book. In "The Mansion," a very successful tech whiz is reunited with his down-on-his-luck former partner and rival to build a supercomputer that runs every function of an abandoned mansion. Needless to say when you put complete trust in a computer to run your home, bad things are going to happen. The first half of this book seems a little too familiar. It reads like a reductive rewrite of "The Shining," complete with a remote winter setting, an alcoholic, abusive husband, an imaginary bar and, wait for it... creepy twins!

That said, the story takes off in the second half as the two former friends try to stop Nellie, the Siri/Alexa brain of the mansion. It's a pretty good read for a story that seems like lesser hybrid of "The Shining" and "2001: A Space Odyssey." Still, I'd recommend it.

This Advanced Reader Copy was provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Release date is December 4, 2018.

I was not disappointed with this book. I fell in love with the Hatching series and was hoping that this new book wouldn't let me down. He has proven to me that he is here for the long haul. I cant wait until his next book. Thank you for the opportunity to read and review this book prior to release.

"Mansion" is my first exposure to the work of Ezekiel Boone. The book is written so well, with so much backstory, and character development that I felt like I was reading a third or fourth title in a series. The idea that I had missed out on the first in the Mansion series hovered in my head at every turn from such a richly woven narrative. I can't seem to capture in words the feeling. This has to be the most developed backstory that I've read in a very long time. I wouldn't be surprised if the author has written quite a bit of that "history" down with a prequel due out in the future. It was that strong. Never ever have I had this overwhelming sense in a story before. I even searched Amazon, Goodreads, and Overdrive to see if the Hatching series might somehow factor into this title.

The author's style is fluid and created an immersive read for me, more so as the story developed. Boone threw in a couple of false leads for me as I tried to guess where he was going, keeping me guessing until the slightly shocking end. I could feel a degree of discomfort from the character's perspectives in quite a few scenes, the creepiness of their circumstances being easily transmitted to me as the reader. I really did enjoy the book and would love to read the prequel. And I bet it already exists in some form. Wow.

Loved this high tech haunted house tale

Years ago Billy Stafford and Shawn Eagle lived in a hovel on property owned by Shawn's family for generations. They were just starting out as programmers but were well on their way to creating the next generation of unseen before technology.

Billy ended up with Shawn's girlfriend and started on a downward spiral with his life. And Shawn created a multi-billion dollar tech empire.

Things would have been different if Shawn didn't come back to Billy years later asking for his programming help to finish what they first started.

This was one creepy book. I loved every bit of it. It was very similar to THE SHINING in more than one way but that didn't lessen my enjoyment because I love THE SHINING.

This book takes place in the not-so-far future when self-driving cars are readily available.

I received this book from Atria Books/Emily Bestler through Net Galley in the hopes that I would read it and leave an unbiased review.

Loved this book, it wasn't scary as give you nightmares it was more of the creepy factor that this could actully happen. We rely on technology so much that if "Nellie" was real no way would I ever want something like that. I found my self still thinking about this book a couple of days after I finished it I don't think there was one thing I didn't like. I can't wait for this to come on sale to reread again.

Thanks to netgalley and Atri books for this ARC.

Truth – I’m disappointed.

I loved the author’s Hatching series. And while I recognize that, by its very nature, The Mansion can’t be a bitey bitey chomp fest, I still expected something…epic.

Instead, I got flashbacks. Lots of ‘em. The kind where eventually you start skimming through them to get to the current story.

I got a love triangle. The love triangle of all love triangles. Not only does it fill the plot, it becomes the plot!

I got some weird twins. I liked them, but thought they belonged in a different book.

Luckily, though, there was Nellie. I wanted more Nellie. I got a little of her towards the beginning of the book, but then we don’t get any more of her until a full 49% of the book! That’s a lot of book to get through without getting to the reason we’re all here.

The 2nd half of the book was fabulous – it was exciting and suspenseful and, oh, it kept me reading. But even with that, it wasn’t epic and, in the end, even Nellie kind of disappoints.

I still look forward to the author’s next offering. I’m just going to pretend I didn’t read this one.

Review: THE MANSION by Ezekiel Boone

Readers who have read Ezekiel Boone's HATCHING Trilogy know this author cranks up tense suspense and delivers the scares. I venture to predict: "you ain't seen nothing yet." THE MANSION scared the living daylights out of me, a Haunted House story like no other. Oh, a time or too writers or filmmakers have taken a run at the "Smart House" concept, but THE MANSION goes far beyond. (And yes, I also predict this one will be optioned for film.)

THE MANSION draws in many different threads of Themes, and extends to concepts that stretch my imagination, and is comparable to Neal Stephenson's REAMDE in its exploration of computing. Yet the novel also reaches into the realms of Arthur C. Clarke and Peter F. Hamilton as it explores the ramifications of Artificial Intelligence. Indeed, as it discusses the evolution of computerized "personal assistants," the potentials become frightening, and of course, THE MANSION focuses on a beyond-next-generation computerized "assistant." Beware in whose control you place your safety.

This alone would be sufficient to create an exceptional novel. But Mr. Boone doesn't pause at that. He delivers characterization peeled down to the core; he allows character evolution (and devolution); and he delivers a family line so evil that I can only compare it to the family sequence in LINEAGE by Joe Hart. Many sleepless memories will plague me when I remember.

THE MANSION is the novel for which you set aside a block of time and turn off all distractions. Get a comfortable armchair and settle in, for you won't be surfacing until the end.