I received the ARC of this novella from the author in exchange for an honest review.
Before I start my review, I gotta admit thing first. Honestly, I never really interested in reading horror stories. Any horror stories. I don’t care who the author is or if the book is pretty popular among my friends. I even hate books (which basically are not horror-themed) which contain very little sparks of horror on it. I believed that reading is a joy where we could fully escape without having to worry about being lost because we can always close the page to come back. And I believed horror books could not give me that kind of joy. Until today.
When I first encountered the author, Derek Neville, on GR offering ARC of Ghost Box novella, the blurb he wrote was really intriguing and made me curious. Then I made a visit to the author’s blog and came across the excerpt of this new novella. And by the end of the excerpt, I knew that this was more than just a crappy horror story and I was hooked to the story.
Ghost Box is a story about Boyd Dwyer, a former cop who’s now a freelance security of some empty buildings. The reason he retired is the last thing he wanted to wrap his mind around his whole life. Struggling with ton of bills to pay and constant dark feeling he had inside, Boyd decided to take the job in supervising a long-time empty hotel named Westinghouse. That’s when the boring job he hatred a lot turns into something that strongly trigger his past and forever change his life.
The idea of the story is really interesting and raising curiosities among readers. The content was dead intense and had me flipping the pages continuously without wanting to stop even though my surrounding had turned chillier. I liked it that even though the story went even scarier page by page, the mystery and tricky scenes inside managed to pull us closer even more. So that timid readers like me (even when I was so damn scared) would not want to put the novella away ‘cause my curiosity successfully won over my being scared. I felt a mixed-feeling reading this novella. When the secret behind finally revealed I felt damn terrible I wanted to cry so badly. And by the end of the page, I wished there was another pages behind it. The fact that the story that I was reading was all written in a form of novella was long forgotten somewhere in beginning chapters. I wished the book offered a longer and more vivid ending or I could not stop thinking (or hoping) the possibility of the sequel. Even though I had no idea how the sequel should get going…
Generally, Ghost Box is nothing like a debut novella at all. The story was very well-written. I did not meet any errors on the book (or I thought I barely met any because I was just too engrossed wholly in the plot to notice any typing or grammatical errors). Derek’s writing style is really good and on certain parts I could sense the joke inserted naturally and made me laughed.
Ghost Box can actually be considered as one of successful horror debut novella. And I’m hoping to read more of Mr. Derek’s writing in the future.