A single mother working in the gothic mansion of a reclusive horror director stumbles upon terrifying secrets.
Harry Adams loves horror movies, so it’s no coincidence that she accepted a job cleaning house for horror-movie director Javier Castillo. His forbidding gray-stone Chicago mansion, Bright Horses, is filled from top to bottom with terrifying props and costumes as well as glittering awards from his career making movies that thrilled audiences—until family tragedy and scandal forced him to vanish from the industry.
Javier values discretion, and Harry always tries to keep the house immaculate, her head down, and her job safe. Then she hears noises from behind a locked door, noises that sound remarkably like a human voice calling for help. Harry knows not asking questions is a vital part of keeping her job, but she soon discovers that the house may be home to secrets she can’t ignore.
I finally picked up Christina Henry's The House That Horror Built after numerous attempts to do so previously (in which I never really started it but was reading review books or event books)! This time I sank into the book and was ready to be scared witless, or at least mildly spooked!
There's definitely a great air of mystery to this story, but it wasn't as spooky or terrifying as I had hoped it would be. It was a subtle kind of horror that danced in and out of the pages. But when the spooky moments started happening, it got seriously creepy and weird!
Harry is a young, single mom trying to do the best she can in raising her teenage son, Gabe. Harry has a pretty tragic backstory, in which we glimpse through sporadic flashbacks. The story starts out alternating a flashback of Harry's and one of Javier's as well. It helps to paint their backstory and how they ended up in their current situations.
Harry doesn't have much of an education, so she takes somewhat menial jobs and one of them is cleaning the house of the movie director, Javier Castillo a few days a week. And one day when she's cleaning, she hears someone whisper "help me" through the walls of a room, a room that is always locked and she is never to go into.
Then other strange things start to happen around one of Javier's movie props where things don't seem quite right with it. Harry tries to shake it off and keep her head down as she does her job that she desperately needs. And while the spooky moments are few and far between, Henry teases enough out to keep this reader invested. Then that's when things begin to escalate.
There is a bit of mystery surrounding Javier and the family that left him many years ago. It's a taboo subject for Javier and is part of what his flashbacks tell us. Things begin to slowly come together towards the end though and the last part of the book is where the heart-racing danger finally comes into play!
While I did really enjoy The House That Horror Built, I was a little dismayed by the somewhat slower pacing and only teases of the scary things. I guess with a title like that I had expected there to be a little more spookiness going on. The moments they popped up were spooky enough, but alas, they always ended and it would be a few pages more before they happened again. The ending did make up for it and was quite the eye-opener in terms of resolutions. Of course, I still have lingering questions about Harry and her future. Much like I did with one of Henry's last books come to think of it. I mean, I get the bone-chilling ending of, "but wait...!" It does leave this reader's mind reeling for sure, but yeah, I wouldn't have said no to maybe a wee little epilogue either. Lol.
All in all, while it wasn't the fast paced horror novel that I had hoped for, it was intriguingly spooky and knew how to reel a reader in. Not being a horror movie buff, I don't know if these unanswered questions are trends or not, but it does feel pretty on par for the few horror movie endings that I know of!
Overall Rating 4/5 stars
