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Summary
Summary
From Blumhouse Books, a haunting thriller about a troubled married couple whose vacation to Paris leads them into a nightmare.
"Dark and deeply disturbing. I'm still shuddering."--R.L. Stine
"An impressively compelling chiller... an ideal choice for late nights alone." -- CultureCrypt
Mark and Steph have a relatively happy family with their young daughter in sunny Cape Town until one day when armed men in balaclavas break in to their home. Left traumatized but physically unharmed, Mark and Steph are unable to return to normal and live in constant fear. When a friend suggests a restorative vacation abroad via a popular house swapping website, it sounds like the perfect plan. They find a genial, artistic couple with a charming apartment in Paris who would love to come to Cape Town. Mark and Steph can't resist the idyllic, light-strewn pictures, and the promise of a romantic getaway. But once they arrive in Paris, they quickly realize that nothing is as advertised. When their perfect holiday takes a violent turn, the cracks in their marriage grow ever wider and dark secrets from Mark's past begin to emerge.
Deftly weaving together two complex and compelling narrators, S. L. Grey builds an intimate and chilling novel of a disintegrating marriage in the wake of a very real trauma. The Apartment is a terrifying tour-de-force of horror, of psychological thrills, and of haunting suspense.
Author Notes
S. L. Grey is the pseudonym for Sarah Lotz, author of Day Four and The Three , for which she won the British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer, and Louis Greenberg, a writer and editor in South Africa.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Two boring characters lurch toward their fate in this listless contemporary horror novel from Grey (the writing team of Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg). Mark's shotgun marriage to trophy wife Steph, who's already haunted by the ghosts of Mark's failed first marriage, is further strained by a home invasion. A chance to reset by swapping their apartment in Cape Town, South Africa, for one in Paris, France, only makes matters worse. When Mark thinks, "I'm nothing but a cliché," he is sadly on the nose, as Grey doesn't give readers any reason to care about a whining sad sack who accidentally killed his daughter. Steph's jealousy and selfishness make her little better. The use of past-tense narration by Steph takes the mystery out of Mark's present-tense account, and the horror elements (a suicide, hallucinations) produce barely more than a yawn. The story is slow until the rush to a senseless final death and a buck-passing ending that disappoints instead of satisfying. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Mark and Steph weren't injured in the break-in robbery of their Cape Town apartment neither was their daughter, Hayden but the resulting trauma is rotting their relationship from the inside. On a whim, they decide to use an apartment-swap website to spend a week, just the two of them, in Paris. But apartment 3B isn't the cozy, charming getaway they were promised. It's cold and musty, lacking Wi-Fi, and dark from locked window shades, and the building is practically deserted. A credit-card issue basically traps them there, at which point Mark finds something in 3B's closet: buckets full of human hair. Grey, a pseudonym for Sarah Lotz (The Three, 2014) and Louis Greenberg, believably corners the couple in an unwinnable situation eerily familiar to anyone who's had a vacation go awry. The ante is viscerally upped every new day a creepy neighbor, an unnerving wax museum, an animal death, and visions of Mark's dead child from a previous marriage and, as with Grey's surreal The Mall (2014), the authors change the game halfway through to disorienting effect. Bonus: features the scariest haircut scene possibly ever.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"SUDDENLY IT ALL struck Misao as impossibly artificial." This epiphany comes to a middle-class Tokyo woman about halfway through Mariko Koike's unnerving novel THE GRAVEYARD APARTMENT (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, $25.99), after a scant three months of living in the title residence: a roomy eighth-floor flat that overlooks a temple, a burial ground and a crematory. (No wonder the price was so reasonable.) What seems to her artificial isn't the strange things that have been happening in the building - the sudden death of a pet bird, a mysterious cold wind in the basement, an elevator that stops working at the most inconvenient times - but the day-to-day life she lives with her husband, her small daughter and her dog, which goes on as if nothing were happening at all. "Everything Teppei and I do these days - no, really, everything the four of us do, including Tamao and even Cookie - somehow feels as if we're all acting in a play, she thought. A theater-of-the-absurd play about the daily routine of an utterly ordinary family living in a beautiful, sunny apartment, without a care or worry in the world. Just an average family, living in a perfectly normal building, playing their parts to the hilt. Except that something isn't quite right about this idyllic tableau...." The idea expressed here, that a glimpse of other worlds beyond (or beneath) our own can make our accepted reality look mighty peculiar, is a common one in horror fiction; Misao's interior monologue just states it a bit more baldly than usual. Because it's so on-the-nose, though, it started me thinking about how plot works in horror novels. The short story is the ideal form for horror because it can convey a quick, vivid impression of fear, without having to extend the action past the breaking point of the reader's credulity. "The successful ghost story," the great English writer Robert Aickman remarked, "is akin to poetry and seems to emerge from the same strata of the unconscious." All Aickman's horror fiction is short. For longer works like "The Graveyard Apartment," there's really only one basic plot available: A person (or a group of people) struggles to escape an impossible situation. And the mechanism that keeps the plot moving is, inevitably, denial of the sort Misao describes - the stubborn refusal (until it's too late!) to believe that what's happening is in fact happening. What's most effective about Koike's writing (the lively translation is by Deborah Boliver Boehm) is that she links the beleaguered family's reluctance to accept the direness of their circumstances to a kind of habit of denial, a longstanding determination to push unpleasantness away. Misao and her husband, Teppei, began their relationship while he was married to another woman, who committed suicide when she discovered their affair. They don't like to talk about it; they keep her memorial tablet in a little shrine in the back of a closet. In a sense, they've been living in a "theater-of-the-absurd play" for quite a while, dodging the ghosts of their past and doing battle with the monsters of cognitive dissonance. The malevolent forces closing in on them are more things not to face, and although Misao and Teppei are proficient at that, the added weight is crushing. Too many elephants, not enough rooms. Their expertise in denial doesn't serve them well here. But it sure keeps the plot humming along. There's an eerily similar dynamic at work in S. L. Grey's THE APARTMENT (Blumhouse/Anchor, paper, $15). Mark and Steph, South Africans who are also troubled by some bad history, do a bargain house-swap online with a Parisian couple and find themselves stuck with a musty apartment in Pigalle that looks as if it hasn't been inhabited in years. The building has just one other tenant; the windows won't open; there are odd, unaccountable sounds and large bags full of hair in the closet. When they call home, they learn that the people with whom they've swapped, the Petits, haven't turned up. The South Africans' credit card doesn't work, and they don't have enough cash for even a cheap hotel, so they're trapped. Much of the story, which is told in the alternating first-person narratives of Mark and Steph, consists of their attempts to extricate themselves from these creepy circumstances, both physically and psychologically. The physical side involves running around to banks and trying to marshal their dwindling financial resources. The psychological aspect - which is more interesting - has to do with the ways in which they adjust to their bizarre new reality, how they keep reassuring themselves, hopefully, that everything's going to be all right. (It really isn't.) It's clear that the authors - S. L. Grey is the collective pseudonym of Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg - are more interested in their characters' mental adjustments than they are in the mechanics of the spooky plot, and as a result their novel is both a little more penetrating and a little less suspenseful than "The Graveyard Apartment." They're good books, each in its different way an exploration of a marriage haunted by unspoken shame and guilt, but the demands of sustaining a novel-length narrative have the effect of attenuating their best qualities. They'd both be better off as short stories. That's not the case, exactly, with J. Lincoln Fenn's DEAD SOULS (Gallery Books, paper, $16), which is a wickedly entertaining take on the traditional selling-your-soul-to-the-Devil story. The vendor, and narrator, an Oakland marketing expert named Fiona Dunn, is witty enough to realize that the transaction she has made represents "just such a medieval idea," but she's also genuinely frantic to find a means of getting out of the deal, made during a drunken hookup with a smooth-talking guy who calls himself Scratch. Because this is California, there's a support group for similarly damned souls, and Fiona begins to get a notion of the kinds of favors the Devil requires of those who trade with him: mass murder, acts of terrorism - nothing that can be lived with by even the most skilled practitioners of denial. Fiona, though, clings to the belief that her marketing talents can help her persuade her soul's owner to revoke, or at least modify, their arrangement. She's a slick talker too, and she hopes she's a match for him: "We're in the same line of work, after all," she says. For most of the book, she's dashing frantically all over the Bay Area, cooking up get-out-of-hell schemes and trying to implement them and putting out the fires (not all of them metaphorical) that keep flaring up to impede her progress. This book has plot to burn. Fenn's problem, though, is that there's almost no way to resolve it satisfyingly. If the Prince of Darkness can't be defeated, then all the heroine's furious action is pointless. And if Fiona can outwit him and take her soul back, well, he certainly isn't much of a Devil, is he? Fenn, clever as she obviously is, can't quite figure out how to square this circle - the one reserved in hell for writers of ambitious horror novels, plotting and plotting into the endless night. Sebastià Alzamora's startling BLOOD CRIME (Soho, $25.95) avoids that fate by the simple, daring expedient of ignoring the supernatural-horror elements of its plot more or less completely and concentrating instead on the real-life horrors of its historical setting: Barcelona in 1936, at the outset of Spain's devastating civil war. The city is under the control of the Federación Anárquica Ibérica, the FAI, a violent anarchist faction. "And," an overwhelmed police detective muses, "there must have been few cities in the world now where killing came as easily as in Barcelona." The story begins, however, with the monologue of an anonymous vampire, who introduces himself with a casual blasphemy: "Often, when I am overcome by thirst, I put myself in mind of the Holy Spirit." He explains that he, like the Holy Spirit, is "classed among those whose existence is inconceivable to men," and then, warming to his subject, goes even further. "The word most frequently employed to label what I am is monster" he writes, "and it does not trouble me to put it down in black and white. The Holy Spirit is also a monster. God is a monster. And it is a well-known fact that He infused monstrosity into all of creation." There's an apologia pro vita sua for you. Soon after, the garrulous blood-sucking theologian drains a few victims, but his thirst remains largely quiescent for the rest of the book. His philosophizing does not. Although Alzamora follows many different human characters as they go about their often murderous business, the thoughtful vampire periodically interrupts the action with aphoristic commentary. "Fear is the acid of the soul," he announces, "it corrodes without distinction children's dreams and men's desires." And this: "We monsters are not part of this world, but we exist and intervene in it, making our way among men, fashioning ourselves through them. Inside them." By the end of this eventful but consciously open-ended story, you realize that the vampire doesn't really need to draw any more blood for this to be a horror novel. All he has to do is be a metaphor, to hover over the gruesome action like a malign Holy Spirit, watching men who have become monsters and feeling that he has had some part in that - that he has conferred on them his terrible form of grace. "Blood Crime" (beautifully translated from the Catalan by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent) has a sort of concentrated power that's rare in horror novels. It's akin to poetry. In his superb new novel THE FISHERMAN (Word Horde, paper, $16.99), John Langan also manages to sustain the focused effect of a short story or a poem over the course of a long horror narrative, and it's an especially remarkable feat because this is a novel that goes back and forth in time, alternates lengthy stretches of calm with extended passages of vigorous and complex action, and features a very, very large monster. Like Robert Aickman, Langan is a short story writer by inclination; "The Fisherman" is only his second novel, and this one took him over a dozen years to finish. The story is about a Hudson Valley man named Abe who takes up fishing after the death of his wife; eventually he begins fishing with a co-worker named Dan, whose family was killed in a car accident for which he feels responsible. At a certain point, Dan mentions a place called Dutchman's Creek, which doesn't seem to appear on any of the standard maps and which nobody they know has ever fished. On their way, they stop at a diner - it's upstate New York, so you have to - and hear, in great detail, a frightening local legend about the place, from the time, early in the 20 th century, when the Ashokan Reservoir was being constructed. The tale involves a magician, reanimation and a huge mythic beast, but the men go on to Dutchman's Creek anyway. Abe, who narrates, tells himself, as characters in horror stories do, that it can't be true; Dan may have other reasons for forging ahead. "The Fisherman" is unusually dense with ideas and images, and, with the tale heard in the diner taking up the middle third of the book, it's oddly constructed. But there's a beauty in its ungainliness. Langan writes elegant prose, and the novel's rolling, unpredictable flow has a distinctive rhythm, the rise and fall of its characters' real grief. These fishermen are restless men, immobilized but never truly at peace. Again and again, they cast their lines in the hope of catching something, anything, that will restore them to who they were. Abe characterizes himself as "desperate for any chance to recover what I'd lost, no matter what I had to look past to do so," and you feel that sad urgency on every page of his strange and terrifying and impossible story. Langan's novel wears its heart on its sleeve. In Brian Evenson's science-fiction horror novella THE WARREN (Tom Doherty/ Tor, paper, $11.99), the organ on display is a brain, specifically that of a character called X, who lives in some sort of underground facility with, often, only a computer monitor to talk to. He has a lot of time to think, and the big question for him is whether or not he is actually a person - and if so, in what sense? The monitor isn't helpful on this subject. X's brain, it seems, has been programmed with other people's memories, as a way of preserving them against the likelihood of extinction. As the story begins, he wonders first if anyone else is still alive, and then whether any "material" remains to serve as a repository for the thoughts and memories - the notional self - currently housed inside him. Otherwise he might be the last of his kind. Whatever kind that is. X's brain turns out to be a wonderful setting for a haunted-house story, because all sorts of diverse spirits are slithering around in there and playing tricks on him. "Parts of me," he says, "know things that other parts do not, and sometimes I both know a thing and do not know it, or part of me knows something is true and another part knows it is not true, and there is nothing to allow me to negotiate between the two." This brain is treacherous. At one point X says, "I am not the only part of me doing this," and later, more ominously, "I am working against myself." He can fall asleep as himself (he thinks) and wake up as someone else, or several someones else. His struggle to find his way in this mental labyrinth is all the plot Evenson needs to spin a suspenseful, darkly comic tale. "Je est un autre" ("I is another") Rimbaud said. We've all felt like that from time to time, but poor X feels it, multiplied, at every moment of his conscious life. "The Warren" is chilling because X's situation is not only impossible but truly, inherently irresolvable. It ends as all horror stories should, with a question mark. TERRENCE RAFFERTY, the author of "The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies," is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
Guardian Review
The End of the Day by Claire North, The Book of Bera by Suzie Wilde, From Darkest Skies by Sam Peters, The Apartment by SL Grey, Cold Welcome by Elizabeth Moon Claire North, the pseudonym of Catherine Webb, has earned a reputation for tackling serious subjects with a lightness of touch, enviable readability and an assured narrative control. The End of the Day (Orbit, [pound]16.99) is her most ambitious novel, taking on a plethora of major issues and offering hope. Charlie is the Harbinger of Death -- whose office is based, prosaically, in Milton Keynes -- and he travels the world meeting those about to be visited or merely brushed by Death, and observing events and cultures about to pass from existence. His fellow Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Pestilence, War and Famine, are normal men and women like Charlie who also jet around on business. It's a surreal, whimsical conceit that allows North to examine bigotry, global warming, humanity's propensity for violence -- and the big one, the meaning of life and death. Every one of the short 110 chapters is shaped with philosophical panache. In The Book of Bera (Unbound, [pound]16.99), Suzie Wilde heaps misfortune after catastrophe on the shoulders of her young protagonist, the eponymous Bera, and then catalogues her efforts to understand and overcome her lot. Bera is blessed -- or cursed -- with "sight", the ability to see into the future, control the forces of nature and ward off evil spirits. She lost her mother when young, and loses her best friend; her father then weds her against her will to another clan. The setting is not that of some generic feudal/pastoral fantasy, but a lovingly detailed Norse land that Wilde brings to startling life along with the minutiae of Viking culture. As Bera grows with the knowledge of her gift, she foresees disaster ahead for her new clan, and is torn between the need to save her people and the desire to avenge the slaughter of her childhood friend. The first volume of the Sea Paths series, this is an impressive debut. We have been here many times before: the detective mourning his/her partner/colleague is tasked with solving the crime of his/her death and coming to terms with his/her grief. But From Darkest Skies (Gollancz, [pound]14.99) by Sam Peters is different. After Alysha Rause is murdered on the planet Magenta, her husband, secret agent Keon Rause, travels there to investigate her death -- with a copy of his wife as an AI in his head. What follows is a complex noir thriller as Rause tracks down a serial killer in a beautifully depicted alien world and learns more about Alysha and her enigmatic "copy" than he ever thought possible. Peters' second novel is not only a gripping SF crime thriller but a moving investigation into the limitations and capabilities of artificial intelligence. After suffering a break-in at their Cape Town apartment, Mark and Stephanie decide to house-swap with a couple in Paris as a way of getting away from it all and, in Mark's case, fleeing the horrors of his past. In The Apartment (Pan, [pound]7.99), SL Grey -- the pseudonym of Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg -- sets up an interesting premise and introduces, little by little, elements of inevitable horror. The apartment turns out to be not quite the chic pad they'd hoped for -- it's more of a squat in a decrepit building inhabited by one other resident, a mad artist. It might even be haunted. The story is told in first-person chapters alternating between Mark and Stephanie, allowing the authors to play with narrator reliability and to examine the fracture lines in the husband and wife relationship. Despite some unconvincing character motivation, The Apartment is afast-paced, page-turning chiller that gallops towards its ambiguous climax. Elizabeth Moon's Cold Welcome (Orbit, [pound]8.99) marks the start of a new series following the gutsy and resourceful Ky Vatta, protagonist of the previous Vatta's War books. Now a victorious admiral of the interstellar Space Defence Force, she returns to her homeworld of Slotter Key expecting a hero's welcome. Instead, her shuttle is sabotaged and she and her peacekeeping force are stranded in the icy wastes of the planet's north pole. What follows is a tensely told story of survival against the odds, as Vatta battles against the natural elements, a quarry that wants her dead and a traitor in her midst. Nebula award-winning Moon excels at depicting an independent leader of men and women who is open to doubt and soul-searching. - Eric Brown.
Kirkus Review
A South African couple seeks respite from their troubled lives by taking a romantic vacation to Paris that quickly becomes the stuff of nightmares.After masked men break into Mark and Stephs Cape Town home, they both begin to suffer from paranoia and insomnia despite the fact that neither they nor their daughter was physically injured. Though they're strapped for cash, they find a website that facilitates house swaps and agree to trade a week in South Africa for a week in Paris, hoping that this time away will soothe their anxieties. But from the very beginning of the trip, nothing goes as expected: the Paris couple never shows up in Cape Town, and the apartment in Paris is like the set of a horror movie, complete with a creepy neighbor who utters cryptic warnings like You be careful here. It is not for living. When she throws herself out a window, Mark and Steph have had enough and return home. But Mark has been infected by the darkness and continues to have supernatural visions of a dead girl. Steph has to protect herself and her daughter as Marks behavior becomes more and more sinister. There are moments of true scariness that emerge from a sustained, deep-seated sense of discomfort, and the novel is very visual, providing cinematic descriptions such as just for an instant, a skittering, shadowy thing, flat and blank-faced and multi-limbed, darted for me like a trapdoor spider lunging for a fly. Grey's (The Mall, 2014, etc.) characters are not deeply developed, but they dont have to be. Chills and thrills enough to attract and please fans of supernatural horror. This one will keep you up all night. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In the aftermath of a home invasion, married South Africans Mark and Steph decide to leave their toddler with Steph's parents and do a house swap with a Parisian couple. This is a chance for a real honeymoon, as there has been tension between the pair. But from the first moment in the unexpectedly dank, dirty Paris apartment, the trip is doomed. Mark begins seeing things that aren't there and hearing the sound of a child crying, and the French couple never show up in Cape Town. Even after they return home, something dark has infected Mark and Steph's lives. The fracture lines in both protagonists are apparent from the first page, which will have readers biting their nails as they nervously await for whatever will tip one or both of them over the edge. VERDICT This creepy read from veteran horror writer Sarah Lotz (The Three), here writing under the pseudonym Grey, will make you hesitate before planning your next vacation. [This title is copublished with Blumhouse Books, the imprint of horror movie studio Blumhouse Productions; film optioned by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment.-Ed.]-MM © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.