Review: One House Left by Vincent Ralph

                                                    

Print Length: 311 pages

Publisher: Wednesday Books (August 27, 2024)

From Goodreads.com: “Ready or not. Whatever you do. The Hiding Boy is coming for you.”

Sixteen-year-old Nate Campbell grew up in the shadow of Murder Road – a street cursed by the vengeful spirit of the Hiding Boy.

Every few years, for nearly six decades, a different house on that street has been the scene of a tragedy.

Nate and his family move to a new town as they try to outrun the curse once and for all. But, when he is pulled into his new friends’ urban legend club, new ghost stories merge with old until there is nowhere left to run.

  

                                                         *******************

My Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5

This one is billed as R.L Stine meets Urban Legend, and that alone was enough to intrigue me as I passed my collection of Fear Street novels down to my children. And in some aspects, I was reminded of those novels, but in others I felt pretty let down. 

To begin with Cherry Tree Lane aka Murder Road doesn't exactly feature prominently in the first half of this story. Sure, we get a few crumbs here and there about people who have died (or in one case nearly died) and the legend of the hiding boy, but then the story changes gears to what could be any other small town in America as Nate and his family have once again had to move, but what isn't made clear is what exactly is chasing them. The family has rules about not getting attached to places or people, but somehow Nate is unable to stay away from Max, and her two other friends Tyler and Seb aka the Hell Chasers - a group of friends who explore urban legends trying to prove (or more often than not disprove) whether or not urban legends are true. 

And this is where I started running into issues. All of the characters lacked depth for me, including Nate and his family. I didn't care about any of them, or their supposed issues. Frankly, when the group found themselves in danger, I didn't care about that either, or whether any of them would survive. 

The haunted house aspect of it, didn't grip me the way I feel the author intended for it to either, at times pushing too much in your face when a more subtle approach I feel would have worked better. Even with everything going on, there wasn't an urgency for me much less anything resembling anything other than mild interest. In fact, I put this novel down in the middle of the big event and went to sleep if that tells you anything. 

However, the twist was surprising and not something that I saw coming, so I will say that saved this one for me a bit. I just wish the rest of the novel would have lived up to the potential that I saw in certain chapters. 

DISCLAIMER: I received a complimentary copy of this novel from the publisher. This has not affected my review in any way. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are 100% my own.