The Effacement

This week I read The Basement by Chad P. Brown. Pffhehehe. Chad. Alright, I shouldn't judge him by his name. Actually, I really like the name Chad. It's great. Just say it to yourself right now. Chad.

(Link)

Description:

"On a dare from her best friends, Heather goes inside the town's haunted house, where Frank Blackwell killed his wife and then hung himself in the basement. But while in the house, Heather is confronted by a ghost from her past, her mother who died accidentally one year ago. Now, Heather must not only escape from the evil lurking inside the house, but from the demons of her own past."

Oh my god this sounds soooo original! I mean, this is a topic I can't even make fun of because of how creative it is. I especially would never have made fun of how common this exact scenario is. Definitely not two posts ago.

So this girl's friends dare her to go into a haunted house, and she does it because she doesn't want to be a chicken. I am not making this up, those are the exact words she uses.

The door slams shut behind her and won't open. So far, so expected. Then she decides to complete the bet, which is to go into the basement. She counts the steps on the way down for some reason and ends up with 33 or something, but looks back up and counts them again and there are only 12. Uh... spoooooky. The real horror story here is the failings of the American educational system.

Then, she has a flashback where she is fighting with her mom and her mom falls down the stairs and dies. She decides that this repressed memory is too fucked up and she should get the fuck out, but then her zombie mother appears at the top of the stairs.

Her mom says she is going to eat her, and she starts approaching. This stupid girl closes her eyes--totally self-aware that it's a stupid reaction because she mentions that it is like hiding under the covers when you are a kid.

Well, anyway, minutes pass and nothing happens, so she opens her eyes. The zombie mom is gone, she got off scott free!

In fact, she was able to process that repressed memory for once in a totally...uh... healthy way and she is actually glad she came to this haunted house. Plus she doesn't look like a chicken.

BUT JUMP SCARE OMIGOD HER MOM ATTACKS HER FROM BEHIND THE END.

Ratings:

Use of the Word House: 5 out of 5. This story had so fucking many instances of the word "house" that I almost went insane. Like we fucking get it! You're in a fucking house! Jesus. Seriously, the sentences read like, "She went up to the haunted house and put her hand on the knob of the house and opened the house's door and stepped into the house and it definitely looked like a haunted house and out of the walls of the house suddenly appeared the ghost of Doctor House." Stop. Enough house. And the shitty thing was for all the uses of the word house, it never came along with a fucking description. A HAUNTED HOUSE IS SUPPOSED TO BE SCARY BECAUSE OF HOW IT LOOKS, SOUNDS, AND SMELLS SO YOU SHOULD MENTION THOSE THINGS.

Speaking of Which, Descriptions: 2.5 out of 5. Now, I have been bitching a lot about descriptions lately I know, but this is an example where some descriptions are good and it allows for the horrible gaps to be pointed out. First, it would have been great to have even one fucking description of the house. What color was it? Nobody will ever know. But, it did start to go right when the zombie mother was described in detail. She looked all decaying and whatnot, and that's good. She's supposedly the scary part of the story, so the time spent there is not wasted. I think one area authors really fuck the pudding, though, is moving past visual descriptions. There aren't a lot of sounds, smells, tastes, or feelings in a lot of stories, and this one is no exception. It SHOULD be an exception though, because it is a horror story. Not only that, there was nothing visceral. Since it's horror I should know what the chill damp darkness feels like on your back, or what exactly your bowels are doing at any given moment. None of that in this story.

Mind-blowingly Self-Aware Cliches: 5 out of 5. This author has some insane talent for pointing out how overdone his own ideas are, immediately after he types them. He has lines saying that haunted houses are "a staple of American society," and he comments on things like, "her horror movie entrance." I really think if you are noticing how stupid this shit sounds even to the narrator who is experiencing them, you should cut it the fuck out.

Overall: 2 out of 5. Horror should be judged by how scary it is, right? Well this wasn't scary at all. It was a weird paradoxical mix of not describing enough and being way too obvious. For instance, lines like: "she started crying as her mind confronted its own assailant: the guilt over her mother's death," and, "She didn't know if the house was haunted or not, but she knew without a doubt that she'd dragged her own ghost inside with her -- a ghost which she'd finally put to rest," are WAY too obvious. Fuck, we KNOW she is haunted by her mother's death, that's what the fucking story is ABOUT, so why do you have to tell us again and again!? Like it's some fucking revelation that the ghost is a metaphor for her guilt or something!? GOD!

If you want to know what I am haunted by (hint: it's monkeys laughing at me after they steal my ice cream at the zoo) check out amazon.com/author/a.c.blackhall.