Audrey's Door, by Sarah Langan

Mar 31, 2010 22:42


Author: Sarah Langan
Publisher: Harper
Genre: Horror
Pages: 412
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars (really liked it)

Audrey, an architect, has just broken it off with her boyfriend Saraub, and needs to find a new place to live -- fast. She finds an affordable apartment in the Breviary, a building with a long history that started out glorified (an opulent “getaway” for the very rich) and slowly turned darker and darker. It's been plagued by a series of mysterious deaths and suicides over the hundred or more years of its existence. Though it is beginning to show its age and falling apart, Audrey is fascinated by the old structure, and so she takes the apartment even though her instincts tell her something is very, very wrong. And something is very, very wrong - a malevolent force is trying to find a door to this world, and it believes Audrey is the one to build it.

Just once, I would like to read a horror novel in which the protagonist is a normal, happy, healthy person to begin with. Audrey has had a traumatic childhood with her mentally unstable mother and is untreated for her OCD. Audrey suffers from persistent intrusive thoughts (involuntary thoughts that are obsessive and upsetting, like being overwhelmed with the repeated mental image of gouging out someone’s eyes while speaking to them) and compulsive behaviors. I actually liked how Audrey’s obsessions (and subsequent breakdown) played out in this haunted house story, and I thought Langan did an excellent job portraying what it’s like to live with OCD (even before the haunting), but it just makes me wonder if a troubled, half-crazy narrator is one of the keys to a successful horror story. I mean, yes, characters need to have issues to make them interesting, but in the last two horror novels I’ve read - Murder of Angels by Caitlin Kiernan and No Doors, No Windows by Joe Schreiber- the protagonist has some kind of mental illness.

Still, this is a very good, very frightening read, and I found the ending satisfying, though it’s a little “peaches and light” for such a scary book. The characters of Audrey and Saraub - the narrators for most sections - are deeply realistic. The other residents of the Breviary - all elderly people from families whose ancestors were original owners, and who have long since been corrupted and driven quite mad by the evil of the building - are uniformly chilling in their decayed, old-fashioned dress and speaking manner, their “parties” in each other’s rooms, and their crafty, conspiratorial plotting. They were my favorite parts of the book. The Breviary itself is a palpable force of darkness and its machinations to drive Audrey to complete the door are nothing short of harrowing. (It reminded me very much of the ghost in Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box, who kept compelling Judas to do - or almost do - terrible things without his knowledge, as if he was sleepwalking.)

Aside from Rick Yancey's The Monstrumologist, this is the best horror novel I've read recently. I'll definitely have to look for more of Langan's writing.

genre: horror, book reviews

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