Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The cover art and the title are the reason I bought this book. It was so intriguing that I had to buy it. Sadly, the story itself just didn't live up to the cover. The author spends more time adding metaphors and similes to every other sentence when she could have been building a terrifying story. You get slivers of info about the characters, but not enough to make you like them, understand them or even just care if they survive the night. At one point, I was actively hoping the ghost bride would kill them all just so we could get a break from their constant bickering. The use of the ghost bride is almost nonexistent until the end. 2 whispers and one sighting aren't enough to make me unnerved by the time she really makes herself known. Where is the buildup? I understand this is a novella, so there's limited amount of time to get there. But if the author had spent half as much time making us aware of the ghost bride's presence as she did heaping prose on top of prose, this would have been a truly terrifying read. I also would have loved it if the author had taken a few sentences here and there to give explanation to at least SOME of the different Japanese folklore and cultural references. Putting the book down once every few pages to Google a random word and then spending 5 minutes reading a Wikipedia article really took me out of the story. Which sucks. Because these things were quite fascinating and would have served so well to add to the overall ambience this story lacks. This book took only a few hours to read. And honestly, if it had been longer, with this style of writing, I wouldn't have finished it. Because it was so short, I was willing to keep reading in hopes that the finale would really wow me. Will I read it again or recommend it to others? Probably not. But it was an alright way to occupy myself for a few hours after work. Overall, this book had so much potential. The main plot, along with the history of the house and the ghost bride SHOULD have left the reader feeling, at the very least, unease. Instead, all I felt was disappointment at the waste of a perfectly creepy idea.