A review by lucasgarner
Puzzle House by Duncan Ralston

1.0

Stopped about 75% of the way through when I realized my brain was no longer retaining what I was reading due to caring so little for what was happening. I love puzzles and horror, and movies like Saw, Escape Room, and Cube are some of my favorites, so it seemed natural this would be a good one for me. Unfortunately, the set up that is the first half of the book almost is incredibly boring and poorly sets up uninteresting 2d characters. The characterization is so bad that you don’t even care if they live or die, you just forget that they are there, summed up by little more than their profession. I kept going to see how the traps were, and they were just as boring and poorly written as the rest of the book. Everyone seemed awfully glad to sacrifice themselves, which made each trap too easy to solve and it never felt like there were ever any stakes. This book will probably do a better job of torturing you than the traps inside will.