You Should Have Left

I do enjoy when I book title can be responded to with a cheeky comment. "You Should Have Left": shit man, you really should have!

A family of three rent a house in the southern German alps to get away for a bit and so the man can work on a script for a sequel to his hit comedy movie. We've got a husband and wife increasingly on the outs and on each others' nerves, and both of them enduring the genuine naivety of their 4-year-old daughter who's caught in the middle. Isolate these people in the middle of nowhere with some spooky going-ons in the background and you've got a plot we've all seen before.

What this book does different however is that instead of being ~true~ epistolary presented like a formal letter or even a journal entry, instead I felt like I was reading a literal notepad. The sections are short and often stop mid-sentence, as if to represent the writer getting interrupted by something (which was frequently happening; poor guy couldn't catch a break on what was supposed to be a writing retreat). Other times they're just literal single sentences, or quick blurbs of ideas for scenes for this sequel. But it never came across as an over-used gimmick to me.

And while I typically don't enjoy when children are present in horror fiction, I did feel for this little girl who was old enough to understand that she should be scared, but not old enough to have any agency to do anything about it herself. She was truly at the mercy of her father trying to protect her from an interesting (to me) variation of a haunted house. And to his credit, he did try his best to do so.

If you're looking for an unconventional house haunting and don't care about having everything explained for you, this should be up your alley.