Gnaw

Five Stories High #3

by Tade Thompson

Tara and Harry Newton have just bought the beautiful Irongrove Lodge, an ideal place to raise their children, Cory and Adrienne. But they are far from the first inhabitants of this house.

Bizarre written messages, unnatural infestations and phantoms noises are just the first fruits of the gnawing spiritual hunger that possesses the ancient building; and soon, Tara and Harry will find out that to buy a house and to own it are two very different things...

Genres: Horror

73 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 1, 2016

About the author

Tade Thompson is a British born Yoruba psychiatrist who is best known for his science fiction novels.

Reviews

[Cait · Rating 3 out of 5]

a horror story of the classic haunted house movie type: well-to-do family moves into a new house with a history, the children get a case of the creepies but real bad, things spiral, etc. solidly written because I think it would be hard for tade thompson to write anything bad, but it wasn't special in the sense of standing out as a phenomenon of its genre or type. still, I enjoyed it and the spooks n scares n gross-outs it provided.

- makes reference to alan tew's theme for the old (and apparently terrible) show the hanged man
- rodomontade
- window tax

(I read this story individually instead of all of five stories high because I heard that the collection as a whole was fairly even and that this and one other were the standout installments. I was most interested in thompson's story, anyway.)

[Kinsey_m · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read and loved Rosewater, I looked for more from Thade Thompson. This short story of a haunted house is also an excellent read, and it has some glimpses of the weirdness in Rosewater, but takes place in England, rather than in Nigeria. There is also layer upon layer of supernatural elements. Suprinsingly for someone writing such complex and intrincate stories, to me Thompson works better on the novel scale rather than the short story format (this conclusion may be premature since I've only read 1 novel and 1 short story, but...). It feels as if Thompson needs length to be able to deploy his full... weirdness. Also, it felt as if we didn't get to know the characters as well as in Rosewater, which clearly wasn't due to lack of talent on Thompson's side. I'm afraid I'm making this seem not as good as it is. Quite the opposite. This was a very good story. I just feel that if the author had been given the space to make this a full-lenth novel (this was published within a 5 story themed collection), it would be superb.

[John Rennie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm afraid I found this a bit disappointing. It's not terrible, but it's a fairly routine haunted house story. I had read and liked Rosewater so when I stumbled across this I immediately read it. I enjoyed it, but but it has nothing in common with Rosewater and I would not have realised it was by Thompson if not for the name on the front page.

[Camille · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is emphatically not my genre, BUT, it is a solid, stellar example of its genre.

This series is fascinating. It's very... cohesive? I would not class all the stories as the same subgenre (and honestly though the locale is ostensibly the same, they do not seem to take place in the same universe, though a sort of multiverse way of looking at it works quite well), but the *voices* blend into each other very well -- not identical but complementary.

One more to go...