A dream within a dream within... a reality? The Night House is a horror story in 3 parts. Which one is real and which is not is up to the reader to discover. A little bit teen slasher, a little bit magical fantasy, and a little bit the horror of life lived, The Night House can appeal to both fans of horror and psychological thrillers. As a fan of Jo Nesbo's Harry Hole series, a Nordic noir this is not. I appreciated the deviance for his typical genre and found this fast-paced read compelling. More please!

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for the opportunity to read and review this ARC.

This was such a strange book. I was drawn to The Night House because of the awesomely creepy cover. It’s such a great cover! The synopsis also had me intrigued. This was my first time reading a Jo Nesbø book. I found the writing was pretty good, but the story was very odd and I was not a fan of the ending. The story took a turn that I was not expecting.

The Night House is told in three parts. The first part takes place when the main character, Richard, is young. I loved this first part. It was strange and eerie, and it felt like a coming of age horror story. I don’t want to give too much away but the 2nd and 3rd parts are wild and the story really takes a turn by the end.

I would like to read more from this author since I enjoyed parts of this story. You might like The Night House if you like strange books with horror and fantasy elements and unreliable narrators.

3/5 stars

THE NIGHT HOUSE was so frustratingly gratuitous that it simply could not be enjoyed. It did, however, help me learn something very valuable about myself, which is that I probably just don't like horror with main characters in that awkward tween age category. 14 year olds are SUCH pills, dude.

My official first book by this highly acclaimed author and I’m so glad it was this one. I absolutely loved the nonsense slasher film vibe this book had. The uncertainty of not knowing what’s real is the best.

Although this horror story is marked adult fiction, I would hand it to an interested teen. The main character is fourteen, which is maybe why I double-checked the genre/rating while reading. I enjoyed it and don't want to spoil it for you, but think of an unreliable narrator when you start getting into it.

Richard, a 14 year old who moves in with his aunt & uncle makes a prank phone call with his friend which leads to his friends disappearance. When another one of his friends disappear, the eyes are on him as the suspect and he must find a way to prove his innocence and preserve his sanity.

While Nesbø is known for his detective novels, The Night House is a coming-of-age horror novel. At only 256 pages, it was a quick read (or listen in my case). I had fun reading this one and thought some aspects of it are cool! I did go in knowing that Part 1 was quite different than Parts 2 & 3 and I think that helped me not get surprised by the tone switch. Overall the novel reminded me a bit of R.L. Stine books with some added layers and clever uses of repetition. There are definitely some themes that were handled in a manner I didn't particularly care for but as with any translated literature I understand that my sensitivities might be different.

The audio was fantastic as is the cover, obviously. If you're looking for quick horror read for October, this definitely fits the bill. Thank you so much to Knopf and PRH Audio for the ARC and ALC of this one.

“H-h-h-he said that you and I . . .” He cupped his hand over the speaking end of the receiver to stop the person at the other end from hearing. “W-w-w-we’re going to—”
“Tom!” I cried. “Your hand! Drop the phone!” Tom looked down and only now realized that his fingers were halfway through the holes in the receiver.

The Night House was a standalone story with horror and psychological thriller elements divided up into three parts. Told all from Richard's point-of-view, the first part brings readers in when he's fourteen and has recently moved in with his aunt and uncle, now his foster parents, from a big city to small town Ballantyne. He's not part of the popular crowd and as such, has a bit of edge to him, where he does a little bullying himself, except with classmate Karen, who he has a bit of a crush on. When him and Tom, a boy who is on the outskirts himself because of his stuttering, come upon a phone booth on the edge of the woods, the story takes a horrific turn as Tom is gruesomely sucked into the phone receiver after dialing the number for a Imu Jonasson.

“I know. But sometimes if you tell a lie enough times, it becomes a bit true anyway.”

This first part takes up more than half the book and follows Tom as he's accused and looked upon as Tom's murderer and when another classmate goes missing, an FBI agent becomes involved. The only one who believes Tom is Karen and she starts her own investigation into what is happening. Tom goes from finding Imu Jonasson's “Night House” in the woods to ending up at a correctional facility for young people, where he learns that Imu Jonasson was also a patient, learning about black word and white word magic, and then eventually escaping with a set of psychotic twins. The first part wraps up with a battle scene to save Karen's life and sort of happy ending that leaves you wondering where the next forty percent of the book is going to go.

Something moved up by the window. I looked up. A face. Pale. The expressionless face of a man, as motionless as a painting. A face I had never seen before, yet which still gave me a strange feeling of looking in a mirror.

The second part spins the whole story on it's head and jumps fifteen years in the future to Richard coming back to Ballantyne for his highschool reunion. He's a famous young adult author after the great success of one of his books “The Night House”, which has also been optioned as a movie. Readers start to get a sense of unreliable narrator with a little bit of Wizard of Oz-ness, as characters appear with slightly different roles than had been presented in, what we now know, was Richard's book we were reading. There's a break through scene where Richard has an emotional breakdown with Karen and he tells her about why he was sent to live with his aunt and uncle, his parents died in a fire. After this story and the reunion party moves to a new Night House, the story starts to spin back to where readers thought it originally was and I got a sense of King's It and the horror comes back into play, only to be spun once again in part three.

“As far as I know, Imu Jonasson hasn’t lived in Ballantyne since he was committed to an institution. And that was decades ago.”
“Did he do something wrong?”
“Oh yes, but not before something wrong was done to him.”

There were a couple clues in part two about where part three was headed and the story ultimately turns into more of an emotional psychological thriller. The last fifteen percent was more emotional than I expected and I want to say that if you find yourself getting very dizzy from the first two parts, hang on because the third part will complement the first two and make the ride worth while (I can see some horror readers being disappointed). I did feel myself gripping the sides of the book, ready to be spun again, but the ending left with a looking good moment, for now. The first part's horror was engrossing even when it felt the wheels were coming off and the second part's wheels did come off but spun just in time to the emotional third and last part ending. I enjoyed the meaning behind the name Imu and the context of how it ultimately tied into Richard's character and once again, the story reminding us that true horror comes from human nature.

He laughed. “You should never trust your memory. It only ever gives you what it thinks you need. So . . . well, in that sense maybe it’s just as well to trust it after all.” He laughed again.

I have heard so many great things about Jo Nesbo, and so I was very excited to read this! I love the writing story, and he was able to take you from place to place in a way that didn’t feel odd. With that being said I will definitely be checking out more of Nesbos books, but this one is an in between for me. I felt sorry for Richard, and he really captured my interest. I think the book was interesting enough to keep me wanting to read, and it was a fairly quick one. I just didn’t really feel horror scared. Overall I liked it!

What in the heck did I just read? It has been a while since I read a book by Jo Nesbo, but this is really not what I thought I was diving into when I began this book. I went in blind, without even reading the synopsis and ... wow. I don't even know what to say really - it was a wild ride. In the end, I appreciated the twists and the way the outrageous things that happened in the Part One and Two were rife with symbolism in retrospect.

Also, I will never get the vision of a man with his arm up to his shoulder in a meat grinder out of my mind. So there's that as well.

The Night House

Thank you NetGalley and Knopf for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. This cover drew me in immediately but I have to say that that I didn’t love this book as much as I was hoping to. The middle of the book seemed slow to me and the action was mainly in the beginning and the end. One of the reasons I kept reading was so that way I could figure out the ending of the book. Overall, I think this is a book that some people are going to love and then other people just aren’t. Unfortunately this book just wasn’t for me.

This is one of my favorite books I've read this year! It's creative, unique, creepy and I loved every minute of it. I highly recommend this! Special Thank you to Jo Nesbo, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage and Anchor and NetGalley for allowing me to read a complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Knopf Publishing for allowing me to read this book.

I am a huge Horror fan. I am also a Jo Nesbo fan, however, this is not your. If you pick this up expecting a novel along the lines of his Harry Hole, you will likely be disappointed. I was intrigued by the premise of this book, and decided to take a chance. I am still not sure how I feel about it.

This book is told in 3 parts. Part I, is very good. Richard, a teenaged boy, who's also kind of a bully, convinces his friend to make a prank phone call, and then everything spirals downward from there. The phone EATS the boy. Boom. Disappeared. The Police are not convinced Richard didn't have something to do with the disappearance. Then another one of Richard's classmates go missing, and the suspicion rises. Only Richard's crush -Karen- seems to believe him and encourages him to solve the mystery of the phone call. Then Richard is sent away to an institution and the story takes a weird turn into black magic and a fight for his life.

Part II, was good, but very confusing. 15 years have passed and Richard is at his school reunion. Richard appears to be an unreliable narrator, as no one seems to remember the past the way he did. Was it all a dream? Or is something darker at play? The entire time I was reading this part, I was unsure if Part I was real or made up, or if Part II was some sort of dream.

Part III was also confusing, as it is set in an institution, but I don't know the timeline of when this supposedly occurred. It seems like another dream, or even a dream within a dream. Either way, it was a bit hard to follow and there wasn't a great resolution to the story.

I would say, overall I like this story, and I THINK I understand it? Although, my brain felt a bit like it did after watching the movie Inception. I generally don't like stories with an unreliable narrator, however, I did like the plot of Part I. I may recommend this book to a few people, just to see if they interpret it the same way. I think other horror fans will probably like it.

✨ Review ✨ The Night House by Jo Nesbo, Narrated by Michael Crouch

This book reeled me in and didn't let me go until I had finished it. It's short - which helped pack it all in for a quick listen over several sittings.

The book starts with a prank call, and the phone eating one of the boys making the call. It kicks off a mystery here, one that the character spends the rest of the book searching for answers for in different forms. The book is disorienting and kind of trippy, but in an engaging way.

While it's hard to talk about the storyline without giving things away, I did really enjoy it overall, though I had a couple of qualms - I was a little uncomfortable with the use of mental health as a device in the story, and there was also a line about Indians in a sort of "cowboy and soldiers" sort of way that didn't need to be present.

The audio narrator was EXCELLENT and kept me hooked into the story. I read this book with a friend, but yet, I couldn't help rushing ahead to the finish!

The beginning is pretty gruesome, but then I think it settled down quite a bit for the majority of the book!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: horror
Length: 6 hours 23 minutes
Pub Date: 03 Oct 2023

Read this if you like:
⭕️ horror set in the 70s/80s
⭕️ trippy, disorienting storylines
⭕️ telephones that eat people

Thanks to Knopf, PRHAudio and #netgalley for an advanced e-copy of this book!

I felt like this book did the backflip but didn't stick the landing. I enjoyed the first part of the book, and it had me hooked and entertained, but then it started to go downhill fairly quickly towards the end.

After an accident, and being blamed for the disappearance of a classmate, 14-year-old Richard is sent to live with relatives. Richard is adamant that Richard was sucked through a phonebooth. Shockingly, no one believes him. When a second classmate goes missing, Richard must clear his name.

The first part of the book had a very YA horror feel, which I tend to love. That is what drew me in. It then got a little too weird for my taste, and I pretty quickly couldn't determine whether Richard was an unreliable narrator or not. It is hard to explain the last part of the book without giving away spoilers.

I would say that I rated the first part 4 stars, the second part 3 and the last part 2 stars, so I settled on 3 overall.

[Reviewers Note: I don't include plot point spoilers in my review but, in this case, revealing the structure of the book itself might be considered a spoiler.]

In retrospect, I should have paid more attention to the last line of The Night House description. Like many other novels, Jo Nesbo's novel is structured in three parts, but where The Night House differs is that each part is almost a different book (and different genre) unto itself, with recurring character names throughout, but not always playing the same characters.

The first part of The Night House presents as a YA horror novel, and my first impression was that the viewpoint — or rather, the intended audience — was probably younger than the young adult stories that generally appeal to me, basically middle grade YA. This is in regard to the dialogue, situations, and behavior of the characters. Nonetheless, the horror premise (inciting incident, at least) of a phone swallowing someone whole had me intrigued. So, I hung in there seeing where the story would go. To my surprise, after part one, there is a complete reset, a fast forward of approximately ten years, the story settling into New Adult category at this point. We learn that a lot of what transpired in the first part didn't really happen as we were led to believe, which might seem obvious, but genre readers have a strong ability to suspend disbelief and go with the unnatural flow. Finally, in the third part of the novel, the genre (or rather, category) switches again, to mainstream YA fiction in a way I won't give away.

I revealed the three part structure mainly to explain my reaction to the novel. It's a clever device, with a satisfying ending, and a lot of readers will appreciate the author's structural legerdemain. And yet, it also feels like three different moods via three different novellas, and it was hard to get totally invested in any of the three before the structural switch to the next part. Of the three parts, my favorite was the middle section, which I thought had the creepiest potential.

Not too scary - read more like YA horror, which is totally fine! It was enjoyable and I would read another Jo Nesbo, hoping he stays in the horror realm instead of the detective realm (which is less my personal preference).

Full disclosure, this is my first Nesbo so I am not familiar with his other work. Told in three parts and with one POV. This was a good kind of spooky for someone new to the Horror genre or wanting something that isn’t too gory. It had the ominous vibes right from the beginning and did not let up until the end.

I always find stories told within stories interesting and usually it works. The premise of this was smart and I appreciated the 90s vibes. I did think Richard was, for lack of a better word, an asshole, in the beginning but you eventually get where Nesbo was going with it.

I did however guess the twist right away. I thought this was fine, but it just wasn’t my favorite. I got RL Stine vibes without the RL Stine if that makes sense lol I will say that the cover gets major points and was definitely a factor in me purchasing this. Thank you Netgalley for my copy!

The Night House is the latest from Jo Nesbo and is perfect if you’re looking for a short and scary book for the Halloween season.

It’s a stand-alone work and is very different from his Harry Hole series, more akin to a classic Stephen King story rather than a Norwegian crime novel, but it still manages to capture Nesbo’s signature unsettling vibes.

The first chapter immediately sucks you in (iykyk) and from there, the action unfolds in a way that will have you questioning what is true and what isn’t. If you’re a fan of stories that play with the perception of time and perspective this is definitely one to check out.

One warning though…the protagonist is extremely unlikable. It’s established early on that he’s quite a bully and Nesbo doesn’t shy away from showing how poorly the main character treats others. I’m not usually someone who is turned off by unlikeable characters, but this was a little challenging to get through.

The Night House is out now. Thanks to Knopf and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Enjoyed this creepy audiobook - narrated by Michael Crouch.
Two kids use a payphone for prank calls. One is eaten by the phone. Ummm yes! I'm in!
When Richard details the events, the Sheriff is not convinced. The page is gone from the phone book; the payphone shows no evidence. Determined to find the truth, the Sheriff keeps Richard in his sights.
Richard tells the story to his classmates. Quickly releasing a patient from an asylum lurks in the town, Richard is desperate to prove the nightmare exists!

Thank you NetGalley and Knopf for this ARC! I’ve seen Jo’s books floating around the internet for a while, but this was my first read by him. I was drawn in by the cover and I stayed for the interesting plot-line!

I really enjoyed all 3 parts of this story and how they all connected, it was done incredibly well. Nesbø’s writing is top notch and some parts truly scared or creeped me out!