Review: There’s Someone Inside Your House | Stephanie Perkins

This Review contains spoilers. 

“It had been so long since Makani had felt any amount of genuine, unadulterated happiness that she’d forgotten that sometimes it could hurt as much as sadness.” 

Published: 2017, by Pan Macmillan.
Pages: 287
Format: Paperback
Genre: Young Adult, Horror, Contemporary, Mystery, Thriller
Contains: Strong Language, Death, Violence, Blood/Gore, Sexual Content, Mentions of Drugs/Alcohol & Depression/Suicide

Warning: If you suffer from paranoia, anxiety, or are of a nervous disposition, I do not recommend reading this book. 

‘There’s Someone Inside Your House’ tells the story of Makani Young, a student whose high school makes the news after a series of violent murders. After moving from Hawaii to escape her dark past, Makani is desperate for a quiet existence until she becomes the killer’s next target. With the help of love-interest, Ollie Larsson, the pair get involved in a man hunt to find the killer, with numerous near escapes.

I honestly had such high expectations for this book, the title and cover attracting my attention immediately. However, instead it was the most romantic heavy, slasher story I’ve ever read.

When I initially picked up this book, I was excited for the gruesome details of the victims death, and attempts to solve the mystery myself before the book reveals it for us. However, the killer was revealed half way through the story, and for a book less than three hundred pages long, it didn’t leave much left after that. The second half of the novel consisted of fear-filled dialogue and a weak fight scene at the climax. The majority of this novel revolves around the protagonists love life, meaning the interactions with Ollie are a priority – regardless of the fact a high school killer is on the loose. Before she was targeted, she was having sex with Ollie; whilst the killer was in her house, she was having sex with Ollie; after she was attacked, she talked about having sex with Ollie. Am I missing something here?!

The killer himself was another problem I had with this story; I didn’t know who he was. This book is so short and the concept is so large that all the information didn’t fit in the small page count. He was a background character, simply a friend of someone who had a few lines of dialogue at the beginning of the novel, meaning his big reveal was extremely underwhelming. The victims are also people we don’t know, characters mentioned in passing previously or even introduced at the beginning of the chapters they die in. How are readers supposed to feel something for a character we know nothing about? I felt nothing for any of their deaths.

The main issue however, was the fact that this novel was being publicised as ‘gruesome’. The killings were pretty bluntly written, with a simple narrative and very little description. I was expecting more from a slasher novel, and was disappointed with the lack of gross details.

Overall, I was really disappointed in this novel. It had so much potential, yet there was too much missing. The characters were brief, the plot-line was weak and the story was simply too short for its concept. It makes me wonder whether this story was initially so much longer and a lot of details were scrapped before being published?

1/5