The Spite House

I really don't know how to talk about this plot at all without giving anything away. I will say it is not the haunted house story I expected, but something totally different and unique. I had never heard of a spite house before picking up this book. According to google "A spite house is a building constructed or substantially modified to irritate neighbors or any party with land stakes." If you look it up be sure to click on images because there are some doozies. They really do exist. Anyway...
Eric Ross and his daughters are in dire straights. They've been hiding out for unknown reasons, and money is running out. The youngest daughter has been taught that if Eric or the older daughter says run, it means she must run and hide and not come out until they find her. We are not told at this juncture what they would need her to hide from, but it was not at all what I suspected.
When Eric sees an ad that promises a huge payout just to stay for free in a spite house and record any strange goings on it seems like just the break his family needs. This is where I thought the bumps in the night would lead to a typical haunting but instead, this story travels down a more unusual and twisty path.
The story is told from multiple points of view, which at times made it a bit frustrating. I would have preferred fewer chapters that veered away from Eric and his daughters. Still, it was a good read in "spite" of that. The ending had my jaw dropping!
My thanks to Tor Nighfire

I’ve seen plenty of characters contemplate the price they’re willing to pay to achieve their ends, going all the way back to Odin plucking out his own eye for wisdom. Characters who pay these kinds of prices are heroes or legends; they do what we often can’t bring ourselves to do. Before I read Johnny Compton’s terrifying novel, The Spite House, I don’t think I’d ever seen a story that asked the corollary question: what price are we willing to make others pay so that we can have what we want? This book is full of selfish characters. Some are flat-out evil. Others (possibly even scarier ones) are convinced that their selfishness is justified by whatever “good” they want to achieve. Oh, and all of this takes place in a house so haunted that I couldn’t help but compare it to the one in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.