I have found that I either really love a book by Ahlborn or it really leaves me cold. This, sadly, is one of the latter.

In concept, it should be a home run: you’ve got a haunted house, you’ve got a creepy ritualistic murder, you’ve got a Mansonesque cult leader surrounded by a “family” of slavish devotees....but somehow it never coalesces. The last thing you’d expect a book on this topic to be is long-winded and dull.

Within These Walls was long-winded and dull. It felt like a short story that had been stretched out to 460 pages.

Also, personal rant: horror writers, can you please stop having every character in your books speak in wall-to-wall pop culture references? While I’m not saying that people (myself included) don’t sometimes make such references, I have never known anyone who quoted old tv shows or movies or songs with every other breath, let alone everyone doing it every time they open their mouths. It’s exhausting, and it isn’t nearly as clever as you think it is.