Customer Reviews

House of Pain

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

WARNING: CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS.

This book looked great--I'm always up for an "evil house" book, cliched as they may be. However, as other reviewers here have pointed out, the cover image, plot summary, and even the title of this atrocity are misleading. The multiple grammatical and proofreading errors are annoying, but not nearly as dismal as the story itself. The plot ends with a cult, in an underground cave, summoning their goddess to receive her human sacrifices. The goddess has feathers and a beak...in my mind, a giant chicken. She sucks people's brains out of their heads, which apparently makes a popping noise and causes their skulls to deflate. Really. This sounds delightfully cheesy, but unfortunately it's not even laughable. Really, really painful.

Despite the eye catching cover photo and the info I received from the back cover I was real disappointed in this book. I came on amazon to read other reviews about it to see maybe it was just me that had a problem with it. But I was surprised to see a lot of negative things about it. I think this book had potential to be better. There was only one part that lasted about 2 chapters that really had my interest. The book was choppy and sometimes the flashbacks kind of got to be too much. I still give it one star, whether or not I could give 0. I only wish I could give 0 stars to those that I really hate and don't even finish. So the 1 star is for actually finishing it.

Interesting if not terribly original idea badly executed.

Other people have commented on the larger issues of plot and characterization, so I'll settle for a pet peeve: the writer has NO ear for dialogue. In particular, she doesn't contract "to be" verbs in dialogue. Over and over she wrote things like, "If it is not too much trouble," or "I heard you are a witch." Who talks like that? It's a little thing, but it threw me out of the story every time. That's an amatuerish mistake, and it almost made me wonder if English isn't her first language. Even if that's the case, though, what editor was sleeping on the job?

This is the story of Tony who builds a home on a foundation where a house had been torn down due to the unspeakable acts of the prior owners. The plot is cliche from the get-go, and the characters seem not to realize this. They act childish, and needlessly go through the motions of people who suffer from their own stupidity. The house seems to be haunted (the author never really explains this), athough she takes the time to explain how handsome some of the men are. In one scene, we have the characters 'muttering' through most of the dialogue. Sorry, I can't recommend this book. It's poorly written, and the plot has been through the wringer a hundred times. There's plot elements that don't make sense. Why does Buddy have the ability to speak with wolves? Does the house make him do this? And the ending? Well, no spoilers here, but you'll know what's coming on about page ten. Buy it for laughs only.

I generally don't like to review bad books but a spate of them have been coming out from one of the main paperback sources of horror: Leisure Books. Despite their publishing wonderful authors like Doug Clegg, Tom Piccirilli, Simon Clark, and Graham Masterton, they've also managed to absolutely embarrass themselves by publishing some very poor choices. This is one of them.

Sephera Giron's House of Pain isn't merely bad, it's the publishing world's answer to moviedom's Plan 9 From Outer Space. I was literally in pain trying to endure my way through this one. The narrative voice is weak, the story line tepid, the charcters cardboard, and yet I sense that the author has a real passion in her love for writing. All the more sad, really.

I'm trying to find one thing nice to say about the book, but I'm at a complete loss. Nothing in it works at all, and it pains me to say that. I see that Ms. Giron has another novel published by Leisure entitled The Birds and the Bees. I need to recover from this one for quite a long time before I'll be able to force myself to pick up another of her books.

Shame on Leisure for bringing out both the best and the absolute worst to be found in the field.

Yet another young-couple-in-a-haunted-house story, but Giron adds one too many twists. A secret cult is an interesting idea, but poorly explained and badly used. The ghosts of the house aren't important to the story, which is a disappointment. And Lydia wins the prize for guillible wife of the year, she ignores the truth despite many warning signs. The characterization is sloppy, one of the bad guys turns over a new leaf for no real reason despite a lifetime of plotting. The ending is horrible, and Giron's prose style actually makes me embarassed for her. She describes a river as, "darkly hoarding secrets beneath its glimmering veneer." I am not joking. Avoid this one.

Not a bad horror story. Based on the horror premise that when horrible things happen somewhere, there is left a trace. In this book, the site was a house where unspeakable acts were performed by the family living there. They were discovered and the town rose up and demolished the house.

Back in present day, a boy who watched the house's destruction with his friends, now owns the land and has built a new house. But he has failed to tell his wife the history of the place or that their house has some of the original basement.

Well, evil things begin to happen and the wife begins to get scared. What is going on in her house? Evidence begins to build and we get some interesting plot twists.

The plot is quite good, but it suffers from being to vague at the start. It is herd to pinpoint when things begin to build, but the do get started and the book becomes pretty interesting.

A good book for horror fans who like stories where evil is a force unto itself and that it can infect people.

House of Pain started off with a bang, and didn't really fizzle so much as it just jumped the tracks and traveled somewhere else at the end. It starts out as a good old fashioned haunted house tale, every town in the U.S. has an old dilapitated house that all the kids in the neighborhood are convinced is haunted. Three young boys watch the destruction of just such a house and steal a brick from the demolition site. Bad move boys. It all comes back to torture them years later.

The story had me so hooked, I couldn't put it down to eat. I just wanted to push on to the end, but half way through it got stupid. The boys grew up and a house was built on the exact same site and evil came home to roost, along with some definite confusion.

The story had so much potential, and it was still an ok read, but if Ms Giron had just hit the mark, this could have been a huge hit. How some things took place and why were left a mystery, and I don't want to ruin it for you in case you love the book. I just feel too much was left out and not explained.

Is it worth reading? Yes. Could it have been better? Absolutely. Will I read another book by her? You bet.

A couple of boys witness the demolition of a house where a couple of serial killers lived and tortured and mutilated their victims. Years afterwards one of the boys buys a new house, built on the same spot where the previous was, and moves in with his wife. Strange things start happening and it all leads to an ancient demon being brought into our world. Good concept and beginning, then bad writing and a final confrontation, which is plainly stupid.

Sephera Giron, House of Pain (Leisure, 2001)

Before you read the book, just open to the back cover and stare at Ms. Giron's photo. Erm, wow.

Now that that's out of the way, on to the book itself. (But you can allow yourself to go back between chapters and stare some more.) I'm not exactly sure how to describe House of Pain. It certainly starts off with a bang, but then it kind of deflates (as if having its brain sucked out by one of the villains). The haunted-house premise is always a great one, and it's got some twists on it here that are, while not wholly original, at least not horribly overutilized enough to have appeared in, say, a Barbara Michaels novel. But by the last fifty pages or so, I was saying to myself "didn't I see this in an old Louis Gossett, Jr., movie?" way too many times. (And it wasn't a horror movie.)

Worth it for the first two-thirds of the book, but be prepared for something of a letdown. ** ½