Review: Loved most of  it but the ending...hard to stomach
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 10 7, 2013
I really enjoyed most of this book and thought for SURE I would give it 5 stars, but the ending was really tough. Ideally I would give 3.5 stars.Craven Place draws you in right from the start as you are thrust into the plight of a  young psychic who is trying to escape its clutches. FIRST, I normally do not like 'psychic' or 'gifted' characters, it is WAY to overdone but I liked the writing early on so I stuck with it and began to like this character. At some point, she meets someone and starts to tell her story, then we learn that the house is a subject of an upcoming book being written by her husband. He has called her to join him for a special evening celebration and although she is already getting very bad feelings from the house, she wants to support him and possibly protect him. When she gets there she find that two more guests have been invited and then, after the husband tells the story of the young girl who was burned as a witch nearby, something really strange happens. One of them vanishes from within the house. This was a page turner for me, I liked the characters, I liked the descriptions of the building and the land and I could really feel the trepidation and psychic attacks felt by the protagonist. This work is part horror and part detective thriller which is pretty intriguing.I am now going to explain why I am only giving it 3 stars. I will not spoil anything however if you continue to read, it is possible that my complaints about the ending will help you figure out the ending and spoil your enjoyment of the story. So it is up to you. Okay, I didn't like the ending and its not just that I didn't like what happens in the end, I didn't like what was REVEALED in the end. As a reader of a story like this, the author asks us to suspend some belief in order to accept the story. We do that and in return we get a good story. You can't enjoy Dracula if you can't accept the concept of a vampire. So there are two schools of thought in this book: there is the supernatural world of witches and hauntings and spirits on the one hand and the rational world of the skeptic/detective on the other. This author seems to want to embrace them both and it just fails. So its not like I wanted a certain character to live or die that makes me unhappy with the ending. It is when all is revealed (both supernatural and rational), it just makes even less sense than before. If the author is going to punish us for thinking one way, he better be able to put on a better show the other and that didn't work at all. When you read the last chapter and learn it all and then start thinking about what the characters did during the story, it becomes less and less satisfying. If I think any more about it, I might go to 2 stars. One more thing: if you are going to stick us with a single character for most of the work, its common courtesy to let us know what happens afterwords. This author is certainly very talented, but I am not going to try another work because i don't like the hollow disappointment I felt after reading this one.