4.5 stars, rounded up!In House of Small Shadows, Adam Nevill has--what I consider to be--absolutely perfect pacing. The creepiness and "wrongness" confronted by our main character, Catherine, builds up steadily throughout the entire novel. We are not bombarded with too much information at once, just enough to positively leave you salivating for more. A book like this keeps your interest, and makes it near impossible for you to find "the right place" to stop reading for the night. I don't mind sa...

Things Adam Nevill Ruined for Me:ChildrenThe name LeonardOld housesThe name EdithWheelchairsThe name MaudeThings Adam Nevill Made Creepier:Marionette puppetsTaxidermyDespite this, and the fact that I read one other book by him, Adam Nevill is rapidly becoming a favorite author of mine. The House of Small Shadows is about a young woman named Catherine. After coming off a violent bullying tactic by a fellow co-worker, she leaves London and works for a smaller valuing firm. She might have hit the j...

Okay, well, that was some creepy shit... Which is, of course, to say that I loved it.Seriously, though, if old porcelain dolls, marionettes, and puppets are the stuff of nightmares for you, avoid reading “House of Small Shadows” by Adam Nevill. Or expect a few sleepless nights in which you endure dreams of dozens of little porcelain or cloth hands trying to grab you from the shadows.It starts off normal enough: Catherine is an appraiser hired by a reclusive old woman that lives in an old mansion...

This one took a while to get into. We do get some of the awesome scary as hell imaginery that I've come to expect from Adam Neville but it wasn't enough for me to rate this higher than 3 stars. The ending is bat shit crazy and a little messy. I didn't hate this one but it isn't his best, either. I will continue to read more by him, though.

Review: HOUSE OF SMALL SHADOWS by Adam NevillWithin the great tradition of British horror is a narrower classification, which when cultivated properly, yields an amazing, abundant, harvest of terror. Of course this particular definition is not confined to the British Isles (I'm thinking of Gord Rollo's "Valley of the Scarecrow," and Thomas Tryon's "Harvest Home" as examples.) But authors native to England, Wales, Cornwall, Scotland, and Ireland excel. I refer to the tradition of "village horror"...

I had high hopes for this book because I’ve heard so many great things about this author and I mean, creepy doll on the cover! But this one just fell WAY flat for me. Things were so confusing at first and I constantly felt my attention waning because I wasn’t really sure what was going on. Some parts were wicked cool and incredibly fascinating but I just didn’t feel invested in the story and that made it a drag to get through because I didn’t particularly care one way or another what happened. T...

We read horror fiction - and watch slasher films, and gruesome documentaries, and online terrorist videos, and accident footage, etc. - because of what Joseph Conrad called "the fascination of the abomination." We like to view things that disquiet us, don't we? We hope that we see something that isn't meant for innocent eyes. Death revealed - and dodged - is as exhilarating as it is horrifying. Our minds sometimes can't take it, but also can't willingly turn away. We seek out the abominations, b...

My third Adam Nevill book and this author is really scoring high points. Three cheers for Nevill and other British horror authors for writing the kind of books I like to read. Thank you, thank you, thank you for inspiring those feelings of dread and unease, and thank you for being so inventive with the creatures that inspire those feelings. You all could take the low road, like so many American horror writers, and go for the lowest common denominator with depressing, disgusting tales of human be...

Wow! Gothic creepiness at its best. This book still has me thinking about it a week after reading it. This is an atmospheric, dark and delectable horror where Nevill lets your imagination fill in blank spaces. The stuff of nightmares. Don't expect fast paced blood, gore and splatter. That's not what this style of horror delivers. In the subtleties are the darkest of things. A book that astounded me with its ability to yet again put me IN the book, Nevill does that to me everyone. I feel so close...

I'm not sure if my rating will be 2.5 or 3 stars. It was a bit of a hot mess at the end and I'm still trying to grapple with what it all meant. The beginning was promising and I really loved the idea of the plot.Unfortunately, the book did not deliver for me. I'm also not a fan of weak main characters and Catherine was this in spades!There were some creepy and unnerving moments in the book that pushed up the rating but it wasn't enough to save the book for me. I really wish Adam Nevill had figur...

Honestly, there are a number of really nice things about this novel, mostly in the descriptions and a few fairly early-on reveals, such as the rotting beehive, that got to me. Other good things were the all out gorefest perfectly reminiscent of all the 80's B-Movie extravaganzas, including all the cheese, all the neatly wrapped-up characters in overblown situations brought together with even more convenient reveals until we get a nice gore-strewn bow made of intestines, or in this case, pre 1950...

Deliciously fucked-up.Not my most eloquent review ever, but I just finished reading, and that's the best I can do.So there.

✪ 1 Star Rating ✪I absolutely hate not finishing books, I really do, so I persevered with this one right to the end (mostly with the hope that it'll get better) but unfortunately I really didn't enjoy this. Instead of this one, I recommend reading The Ritual as I thought that one was a lot better.My main reason for giving this one such a low rating was because I didn't understand it at all. None of it made sense! When I first started reading this book I was totally into it, I enjoy reading about...

Utterly, totally bizarre and horrific novel. Ligotti-esque in vibe and feel, there are a handful of images in this book that won't leave me.

In the end the book wasn’t a hit for me. It started out interesting; I wanted to know the mystery with the house. Then the story goes weird and confusing. And suddenly I turned the last page and the book was over. And I felt let down. It was never ever scary, if stuffed animals creeps you out, then perhaps this book will scare you. But for me it felt just like a waste of time, I could have read something much better that this book.

5 StarsAdam Nevill has become my favorite horror author over the last several years. He was always second to the wonderful Catherine Kiernan who just does not write enough these days. (She was my former favorite and still would be if she put out new material.) Those of you not familiar with Nevill, he is a talent not to be missed. Like most of the British horror these days, Nevill is more concerned with the buildup, the suspension, and the atmosphere over our American quick scares and gory actio...

I like Adam Neville - a lot - but "House of Small Shadows" was a just a major disappointment all around. I couldn't stand Catherine from the get go: whiny, desperate and not a strong female character. You can also see how everything ends from the first time she walks in Red House. The only interesting thing described in the book is the WW1 dioramas - super weird and slightly disturbing. At least in my head they were. Adam is a master of setting up creepy situations and making you feel like you a...

What a dull, sleep inducing book. The characters were bland and uninteresting, especially the main character. It started off well enough, but then it meandered through what could have been a tension building path of increasing weirdness, but for me, I just became increasingly disengaged. I found no surprise in the various reveals, in particular around Edith, where I just kept thinking would you please fucking come out and say it; you've been dancing around for well over 100 pages by this point.

It's true that antique dolls, marionettes, and taxidermy are easy mood-makers in a horror novel, as are mad old ladies living in ancient, crumbling mansions and characters with a history of mental instability. Yet, Adam Nevill took all of these typical scary things to a new place for me and really freaked me the f*** out. My main criticism is that the fever pitch of terror he creates in the last half of the novel is sustained for too long and I started to get impatient with the way Catherine, th...

This was a highly creepy book and I will never look at dolls and puppets quite the same way. I've never found myself prone to nightmares after horror books/movies, but last night, as I was going to sleep, I started thinking of this... and the creepy figure crouched at the foot of Catherine's bed. Needless to say, my eyes popped open and I quickly decided to think about something else :)There are things that are predictable in this and things that were less so, but overall it was just so incredib...