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A review by librarianonparade
The Guardians by Andrew Pyper
3.0
Having just finished a rather epic and quite cerebral non-fiction book, I was really in the mood for something I could just tear through in a day, and this more than fit the bill. I'm always a sucker for a good haunted house story (come on, there's nothing like the classics!) and this one was a real treat.
In places it did remind me of Stephen King's 'It' - friends confronting something terrible in childhood, returning as adults to confront it once again, one of them committing suicide, all taking place in a small 'folksy' town. But perhaps that's an unfair comparison, because to my mind 'It' is Stephen King's finest work, whereas this was fun and easy to read but no classic.
I've never yet found a haunted house story where the denouement lived up to the build-up, and this was no different. I liked the way the two stories unfolded in parallel - the boys' childhood and the adulthood - so you learned what happened back then at the same time as the story unfolded in the present. It meant the tension and mystery were prolonged and drawn-out, and I quite enjoyed that. But the ending was somewhat of a disappointment and it did colour my enjoyment of the book overall.
But if you want a relatively creepy ghost story that'll keep you hooked all the way through, this is just fine. Until the end.
In places it did remind me of Stephen King's 'It' - friends confronting something terrible in childhood, returning as adults to confront it once again, one of them committing suicide, all taking place in a small 'folksy' town. But perhaps that's an unfair comparison, because to my mind 'It' is Stephen King's finest work, whereas this was fun and easy to read but no classic.
I've never yet found a haunted house story where the denouement lived up to the build-up, and this was no different. I liked the way the two stories unfolded in parallel - the boys' childhood and the adulthood - so you learned what happened back then at the same time as the story unfolded in the present. It meant the tension and mystery were prolonged and drawn-out, and I quite enjoyed that. But the ending was somewhat of a disappointment and it did colour my enjoyment of the book overall.
But if you want a relatively creepy ghost story that'll keep you hooked all the way through, this is just fine. Until the end.