Customer Reviews

Unhallowed Ground: A Novel

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

When the child under her care died at the brutal hands of her step-father, the media, followed by the general public, blame social worker Georgie Jefferson. The consensus being she should have removed the lass from the violent household. Officially, her superiors clear her of any wrong-doing. However, the most reviled criticism of her handling of the case comes from within herself. Georgie believes her failure resulted in an innocent's death. She flees London in an effort to regain her sense of worth heading to the estate she inherited from her brother.

Georgie travels to the isolated hamlet of Wooten Coney, population of twelve. None of her neighbors greet the outsider with the slightest hint of friendliness, but Georgie welcomes the lack of hospitality because she needs time to recover. However, a belligerent antagonist cuts off the heads of Georgie's chickens and pours blood all over a canvas the Londoner was painting. As the violence escalates, Georgie knows she must leave town for her own safety, but a nasty snow storm strands her with a vicious assailant as her solo company.

UNHALLOWED GROUNDS is a contemporary gothic thriller filled with growing psychological suspense. That combination rarely seems to work well together, but British author Gillian White gracefully delivers a brilliantly blended book. The protagonist is a jaded individual who sinks into deep pits of self-pity. Still, the reader feels empathy towards Georgie even when the audience wants to slap her face to snap her out of her depression. This emotion happens when the story line turns from a general uneasiness to a revelation that a horrible catastrophe is going to occur. Ms. White paints a dark tale that will give much enjoyment to sub-genre fans.

Harriet Klausner

This book is splendidly creepy. The protagonist is a social worker who has retreated from the world in a rural English cottage which she inherited from her brother. All of the nearby neighbors are warped in different ways. Then she notices someone watching her from a nearby hilltop. The isolation becomes palpable, and we soon sense that whoever is playing tricks on the protagonist is a pretty sick ticket. I would compare this author to Mary Higgins Clark, with the caveat that this book is much more gruesome than anything Clark has penned. My only reservation is the ending which does not satisfactorily tie up all the loose ends.

I enjoyed most of this book immensely, until the ending. The story was packed with sufficiently creepy characters, several possible suspects, and it kept me turning the pages. But the ending was very disappointing in that I felt it was rushed, as if the author was in a big hurry to wrap it all up without enough proper explanations. For instance, what finally happened to the Hopkinses? And what happened with Georgie's career. And why were we not given so much as a clue to the true identity of the killer until the very end? Also I found the author's skipping back and forth from past to present tense very annoying. Once she even did it in the same paragraph!

This book had alot of atmosphere, although it was more of a mystery than horror story. It wasn't scary until the last quarter of the book.

I really enjoyed this book even though I felt the ending wasn't very satisfying. I didn't think there was enough resolution and there were too many unanswered questions.

In the end I was very disappointed by this book. The beginning wasn't even bad, but instead of diving into the thrilling part, the author gets engrossed in a long-winded boring flashback. The main character - Georgie - moves to a secluded cottage because she feels guilty of the death of a girl whose family she was looking after as a social worker. The reader understands that pretty quickly, but unfortunately the story around the girl and her family is reiterated in all detail and from all perspectives - again and again. This doesn't have anything to do with the actual storyline and therefore it distracts from the story and is unnerving for the reader. In addition, this part takes up most of the book - around 220 pages and the "real" story doesn't actually start until then. A positive aspect is that it is nice and easy to read, but it isn't what one expected and wanted to read if one orientated oneself after the book's description.

An interesting aspect is how often it is stated how incredibly sensible and down to earth Georgie is, while all of her actions in the book are absolutely insensible and incomprehensible. It's not of much use to constantly assert character traits if one makes a nonsense of them later. Georgie really went on my nerves - like most of Gillian White's main characters.

Well, finally, somewhere around page 220, the story finally starts. The plot is supposed to revolve around Georgie being plagued by the evil deeds of some mysterious person. But those incidents are just shortly mentioned amidst long tales about Georgie's daily life, visitors and neighbors. The eerie parts are told too casually to really impress. This is compensated for by a fully packed and long finale where suddenly all kinds of completely absurd things happen. This last part is just unbelievable, even for a - would-be - thriller. One just shakes one's head and thinks "How silly." When Georgie finally meets the "monster", she has nothing better to do than to say to "it": "Cold, isn't it? Haven't I seen you here before." (no exact quote). Yes, sure, that's the first thing to say to one's potential axe murderer.

The story changes too abruptly from slightly boring daily life to completely wacky. The solution of the whole "monster-story" happens too quickly and casually. One is disappointed in the end and thinks "Actually a good story - but so badly told." This could have been a gripping book, but now it is just mediocre. A nice unchallenging read for a train ride or for reading a few pages before going to bed - but nothing more.

I know full well that I cannot expect to 'really like' every book that I pick up, but I was particularly disappointed in this one. I bought it to give myself something 'lighter' to read, to give myself a break, to just sit back and be entertained. It was a little hard to get into it at first, but after about 50-60 pages, I found that I was interested enough to keep going. When I was finished, I was left with the feeling that I should have gone with my initial instinct, to set it aside early on.

The jacket blurbs tout the slow, inexorable buildup to a 'PSYCHO-like tension. Ms. White is not without talent (and, with 10 other books to her credit, she most likely has loyal readers), but I think this story would have been better-served as a film, or perhaps as a made-for-TV movie, complete with a few recognizable personalities venturing outside of their regular roles in their attempts to 'stretch out' as actors.

I have to agree with another reviewer, who cited their feeling that the author suddenly increased the pace of the story when she decided it was time for it to be over. There were far too many questions raised that were left unanswered, too many issues touched upon that were never resolved. The main character's relationship with Oliver feels extremely 'forced' from a literary point of view -- and whatever becomes of Dave? Ms. White birngs up some interesting and vital points about the social services field, as well as some psychological insight into depression and codependency. It's obvious that she is sensitive to these issues, and even knowlegeable -- but no real conclusions are drawn, no solutions suggested. Painting the experience without offering any real guidance or options makes it appear as nothing more than a device to inject emotion and tension into a very rambling work.

It's almost as if the author were whipping up the book from a recipe, saw that the book she was cooking needed to be 'on the table', and popped it into the microwave at the end. I was left with the impression that my reading experience suffered because of someone else's deadline -- perhaps she even lost interest in her own story toward the end.

I think the next time I want something that is both entertaining and genuinely terrifying, I'll pick up a copy of THE LOTTERY or something else by Shirley Jackson -- I know for a fact that it'll still scare the hell out of me after all these years, and it'll be worth my time.

This book spent more time trying to impress the reader with a superfluidity of adjectives than on the substance of the story. This author's efforts to skip from the past to the present in parallel stories drops the reader somewhere in the middle! Not a bad story line, but a botched attempt at suspense. This was not a nail-biter; this was not a page burner; it was laborious to follow the story with the constant interruptions and overwriting on inconsequential elements of the story. Her next book can only be better!

Kirkus Reviews said it all. Predictable and dull