Review: Familiar...but eerie all the same
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 16, 2014
Elderwood Manor is a trope-filled horror novella that readers of that genre will either love or be bored by.  Jaded readers might not enjoy the ride because the story hits too many of the standard features of this kind of horror.1) Father and son are trying to recover from loss of wife/mother.2) Father is down on his luck and has to return to the family home and his weird mother to hope for some kind of financial help and stability.3) All kinds of evil has taken root (literally) in the home since he’s been gone, and now he’s stuck there without any kind of recourse to get out as Hell opens up around him.The authors are very good at establishing the creepiness of their story, and the slow build up gives even seasoned horror writers a chance to get anxious as things start to go WRONG in a big way.The cover is absolutely beautiful and is a scene from the book, which isn’t always the case.I loved the atmosphere of the book but wasn’t terribly blown away by the action or the plot.  There are only the two characters, after all, and one of them is a child.  There was too much narration, too much introspective inner dialogue to suit me, and that kept taking me out of the game.  Whenever I wanted to know what was going to happen next, I got plot-blocked by a bunch of information that would have been better served if another person had been there.I read the novella in a single sitting, guessed most of what was going to take place, but still ended up getting tense a few times before the story played out.  For those of you who want a chill and a thrill every now and again, Elderwood Manor may just be the thing for an otherwise calm night.