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amblogging, amreading, amreviewing, Craig DiLouie, Episode Thirteen, ghost hunting, haunted, Horror, ramblings, review, reviews, suspense, thoughts, update
Author: Craig DiLouie
Publisher: Redhook
Series: Stand Alone
Genre: Horror
Rating: 3 Stars
Medium: Paperback
The blurb from Amazon:
Fade to Black is the newest hit ghost hunting reality TV show. Led by husband and wife team Matt and Claire Kirklin, it delivers weekly hauntings investigated by a dedicated team of ghost hunting experts.
Episode Thirteen takes them to every ghost hunter’s holy grail: the Paranormal Research Foundation. This brooding, derelict mansion holds secrets and clues about bizarre experiments that took place there in the 1970s. It’s also famously haunted, and the team hopes their scientific techniques and high tech gear will prove it. But as the house begins to reveal itself to them, proof of an afterlife might not be everything Matt dreamed of. A story told in broken pieces, in tapes, journals, and correspondence, this is the story of Episode Thirteen—and how everything went terribly, horribly wrong.
Review:
I picked this up because it looked interesting and creepy and the back of the book sounded super interesting, ghost hunters filming their “Episode Thirteen” for their series are able to get into a location never before investigated before it’s being torn down for a resort.
The concept as a whole is interesting, the format of it being a book written from the perspective of found footage movies – think Blair Witch Project if you could read it, helped to keep it new and something I hadn’t seen before. I actually really loved the format concept, and they did a really good job of labeling everything, keeping the texts, journal entries, and what was documented off the film recordings clear and easily read.
The little blurbs on the book telling me it would ‘hook me, creep me out, and then overwhelm me’ gave me high hopes about the book and how creeped out I would be while reading it. Considering I’m giving the book three stars probably tells you that I was a little disappointed with the creep out factor.
The characters are well flushed out, and I loved that it was anchored in the real world as far as referencing other ghost hunting shows and the TV networks that air them, giving ‘Fade to Black’ comps so it felt like found footage in the written form. I also deeply love the way the author found a way to make found footage work on the page.
My issues and star drops start to happen because for me, while it’s a ghost hunting, horror suspense novel with review blurbs published on the front and back cover that promised me a hauntingly scary time. I wasn’t all that freaked out with the story. It didn’t haunt me, it didn’t make me fear the dark or the bumps in the night, and it didn’t really stay with me.
I’m also not entirely crazy about the ending and explanation of what’s going on. It kind of went around and around, but I’m not sure the ending really fit the horror suspense genre real well with the resolution of the book.
Do I regret reading it? No. I enjoyed the characters to a point and I did love the new experience to a differently formatted book.
Would I recommend it to others to read? Probably not. Especially not when going into it I expected horror and creep and scares that would make me want to keep the lights on when I went to bed.