This is a great story about a house that appears to be haunted. Only, it's not really. It's something much more as we'll find out.

Set in a small town town, a mother and teenager move to a house that the mother, Robyn, spent time playing in when she was young. Everyone in town knows about that house and people have varying explanations about it. Some say it's evil, others think it's actually harmless. But one thing they all agree on is that it has a supernatural presence.

Our protagonist, Ellis, is eighteen years old. As a queer young man they also suffer from an eating disorder which makes them feel different, isolated, and lonely much of the time. But they will meet a girl who has secrets of her own. Her secrets involve this house and her deceased brother.

When they start to see ghosts and when Ellis finds something truly unsettling hiding behind the wallpaper of the home, they seek answers. But what they are about to discover is bizarre and seemingly impossible.

This novel deals with several issues. Grief, death, acceptance, and even what happens when someone defies Death itself and the consequences that can bring.

We'll find out some things about not only the house but the town itself. Sometimes what you can see isn't what's really there. The author has done a fantastic job setting up these final revelations and leaves us guessing as to what we (and the characters) should believe.

I always appreciate horror books that can take a familiar trope and turn it in ways that make it seem fresh. And that's certainly the case here. It's effectively frightening, tells a great story, and has characters you'll get behind. I highly recommend this one.

I went into this one assuming it was going to be more haunted house horror, but that wasn’t the case.

We have our protagonist, Ellis, having just moved to a new house, in a new town with their mother, who grew up there. They are just trying to lay low, but are immediately informed they are living in a (hand to god) haunted house…

We also get quite a bit of backstory into the house itself, which I loved. I enjoyed the depiction of Ellis’s eating disorder and their subsequent recovery journey. It’s not something that is just glossed over, but a recurring topic in the book.

I enjoyed the story and the characters, but this didn’t strike me as horror. More like a ya supernatural mystery. Either way, I was entranced by the house and what happens in it, how it shapes the town of Black Stone and the people in it.

There is also a really great queer presence to this whole book that I absolutely LOVED!!!