sarah gailey does it again!!!!!! three for three with concepts i love pulled off pretty well for the most part

i read a short story once with a very similar premise to this (<a href="https://ck-walker.com/2016/04/12/death-at-421-stockholm-street/">here</a> if you're curious but if you read this book then the twist has been spoiled for you) and always kinda wanted to know what happened afterwards so this was kind of perfect for me in that respect. i'm not AS much of a haunted house aficionado as other horror buffs i know but 

the house being "alive" in a sense is something that makes me go kinda crazy stupid and while admittedly i started out being disappointed when it took a turn into supernatural horror (as much as i love monsters and ghoulies and shit for the sheer coolness factor the actual Horror of something always tends to hit harder when it's something that could straight up happen irl in my opinion) i think it was pulled off in a way that i liked in the end, though not everyone does from the looks of the reviews.

while the start was maybe a tiny bit slow i tore through most of this book in a night. 

sarah gailey is ALSO three for three in making women who are crazy and fucked up and SOOOOOO much fun to read about. vera was a little freak and i was here for it from beginning to end. i think the only thing that left a not great taste in my mouth was the sort of. i hesitate to call it lesbian-baiting because i kind of trust sarah gailey to not be shitty about stuff like this but i don't have a term for it exactly? like. she told the guy whose name i forgot (james. it was james) that she doesn't date men period and i was like oh sweet lesbian protagonist!! and then she's like actively repressing sexual feelings for this dude and the bartender and whatever and it's like ah. well no accounting for taste i guess but

repression due to a wild bioessentialist serial killer philosophy

is still kinda cool. but then later there's a bit about how she didn't know yet that never marrying a man was an option? and her whole thing where she assumes she'll marry brandon when she grows up because he's the most normal boy she knows so if she has to pick one it might as well be him.

and then at the end where it turns out the sexual feelings might have been bloodlust all along but maybe not????

and nowhere in here whatsoever is any indication of her potential feelings towards women so really who knows at all. honestly i found vera's relationship with all of the men in her life really fascinating and while i do think they maybe would be more so if she was gay that could also be my biased gay self talking. 

the family relationships in this are just AUGHHHHH. this and magic for liars both have the MOST wonderful fucked up painful awkward weird complex family dynamics that i just love to sink my teeth into. seeing vera's dad from her eyes and the way he acted around her made you sympathize with vera's discomfort in the media that painted her father as a monster despite the fact that the logical parts of your brain would tell you he's obviously terrible. and he is! but it felt like i Understood him to such a degree and that's exactly what i like out of killers and generally "evil" characters. i wish we had seen more of daphne's relationship to vera's father and how/when she learned about his. Activities. i also wish we had gotten more about the writer who published a book about the dad, it felt like that kept coming up for little moments here and there but never sticking very much despite the artist guy being the writer's son.

magic for liars still my favorite book from this author but i'd have to reread the echo wife to see if this one beats it.