“What role were we playing? The ghosts or the haunted?” —Julie Khoury, page 106

so here’s the thing. i love haunted houses. i enjoy literary fiction and i enjoy horror. i was ripe to wholly love this book but i didn’t.  jemc’s prose, while absolutely beautiful, does not lend itself to the narrative in the right way i think. the book switches povs between julie and james but there’s no real distinction and i feel like there should have been. i understand if it was the intention to blur these characters together to produce some vague four-handed, four-legged entity but considering how different these characters are, their povs should’ve been instantly recognizable. also by the third act i simply did not know what was going on nor did the narrative give me any solid conclusion. i don’t mind ambiguous endings but this just felt like a horror movie cut 30 mins before it’s ending.