The Good House

Taking down half a star due to what I felt were some pacing problems.

💬: N/A

📖Genres: horror, thriller, suspense, paranormal, supernatural

📚Page Count: 597

🎧Audiobook Length: 21h 55min

👩🏾‍🏫My Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4/5

TW - <spoiler>Addiction, Gore, Violence, Child death, Death of parent, Suicide, Animal cruelty, Blood, Car accident, Cursing, Grief, Gun violence, Injury/Injury detail, Kidnapping, Stalking, Death, Sexual assault, Drug use, Murder, Pedophilia, Rape, and Drug abuse</spoiler>

The Good House is a suspense, horror, thriller, and mystery novel by Tananarive Due. Angela and her family have returned to her grandmother's house, also known by towns folk as "The Good House, hoping that some of her grandma's magic would help fix her marriage but instead a tragedy happens. Two years later while Angela is still coping with the traumatic events that occurred two years prior, she revisit The Good House and discovers that other people have been experience tragic events as well. Angela wonders if these incidents have anything to do with an entity that her grandmother fought against in 1929. Myles Fisher, Angela's high school boyfriend, helps Angela try and solve the mystery before it's too late and their meddling has deadly consequences.

This book felt like it was mostly suspense and it gave me actual stress from anticipation. There are tragic and horrific things that happen in this book, but the way it's written is interesting. I'll explain - the author sometimes eludes to us that a character is going to die and then we have to sit through a few agonizing scenes of them not knowing they're going to die. It was torturous in the best ways! This is the first suspense story that I've read in my adult years that actually creeped and stressed me out.

TW - <spoiler>adult/minor relationships, rape, pedophilia</spoiler>

This is a really good novel but there was one thing that I didn't particularly like about it. There's a scene where a character has possibly <spoiler>turned evil and to depict that the author makes that adult aged character engaging in a sexual act with a 13 year old, so rape. We get that he's evil, you don't have to write that scene in there to show us that he's "gone to the bad side". </spoiler>

The other problem that I have with this story is that it's so long. I don't think a thriller/suspense needs to be almost 600 pages long, I usually expect tomes to be fantasy or fantasy/sci fi books. The audio book for this was 5 minutes just shy of 22 hours long! It was entertaining so there was only one time that I wondered "How long do I have left in this audiobook?". I think there might have been some things that could have been cut to make it at least 400 pages but I know it would change the story drastically to just cut away almost 200 pages. It was a good story overall, just one that I don't think I'll revisit due to the length.

Overall, this book was really good! I enjoyed it for the most part, aside from the issues I mentioned. I'm giving this 4 stars out of 5

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

4/5

I listened to this audiobook for free on [Libbyapp.com]

4.5 stars.

This is by far my favorite of Tananarive Due's works. This is a book that I feel like I will return to in the future and take my time with, because it's just so interesting. The ending was a little lacking but I had a great time with the book overall.

This is the season for haunted house stories. The Good House has a lot going for it: an interesting family saga, lots of scary scenes, and a strong female lead character.

Focused on Angela Toussaint, her teenage son, and her grandmother the story moves around in time as well as point of view. The essential conflict began with Angela's grandmother, who was quite powerful in dealing with the spirit world, but as these things often go, she pissed off the wrong entity. This creates a kind of inherited bad luck for her progeny. Later, Angela's son Corey manages to stir things up when he finds clues to grandmother's powers in the Good House.

I liked the parts with Corey and his friend Sean the best. I'm a middle-aged mother of a teenager myself, and I supposed I should have identified with Angela, but she seemed a little “out of my league.” Intelligent, sexy, athletic, the center of a love triangle with two successful men in love with her, a stellar career, heiress to a beautiful property, and best friends with a rising movie starlet, she is highly glamorous! To add a dose of family drama, she was estranged from her husband and had a tense relationship with her son. The story felt a bit soapy at times; I do love a good soap opera.

The ending's magical do-over felt like a fairy tale more than horror. I'm used to the notions of sacrifices being made at the end of a horror story. I'm uncertain as to whether or not Angela remembers anything that happened and this kind of takes away from the notion of growth as a person she might have experienced. I can see that the author loved her characters and wanted to see them happy.

Due is a good storyteller. I liked the characters and the way Due would give out the backstory information only at the most relevant moment. I would have liked to have known a bit more about Dominique, Angela's mother. I think that might have added a missing layer of depth to the story.

I did not expect the turns this book took! I wasn't sure if I liked the characters at first, but I fell in love with them as I learned more about them, which made the plot points more powerful. The horror elements surprised me and were the exact perfect way to tell the story. I would have liked a little more about her grandma because there were a few things I had to guess at, but that was a tiny distraction.
Tananarive Due fit so much into this book and surprised me in so many good ways. I will definitely have to read more of her works.

This was good enough to definitely keep me engaged but there's a lot of it that fell short for me. Including the ending.

This was epic. It took me forever to read (it was the font in the book, I just refuse to go get one of those magnifying bookmark thingy's, at least for another couple of years), I spent a couple of hours each morning reading a few chapters.
Despite being from 2003, this reads like an old school horror novel from the 70's- many characters, really well described settings and an epic finale. I loved it. The Good House was my first Due. It won't be my last.
There are some truly, truly horrifying moments in this book and so few writers do a haunted house right. Due not only nails that, but the horror is mobile so it's reach goes beyond the house and “The Spot” in the woods behind it. Shudder!
Angela is one THE best protagonists I have read in a horror novel in a loooong time. Seriously, this is more literary than it is being given credit for. There are layers upon layers of characterization here. I feel like I know Angela, Tariq, and Corey after reading this book. I feel like I walked up the steps at The Good House to that bathroom with the claw-footed tub too.

Loss, growth, and dynastic traditions. I deeply savored every page of this horror novel, and I'll definitely be thinking of it for years to come.