Publisher: Arthur A. Levine Books
Publication Date (September 2018)
ISBN 10 - 054593429X
ISBN 13 - 978-0545934299
256 Pages of Story
It's not often that I will pick up a non-series book, but every once-in-a-while, something will catch my eye, so I pick it up and glance through it. The Agony House is one of those type of books. The name alone was enough to intrigue me, but as soon as I saw the cover, I knew I had to know more. I opened the book and started to flip through the pages. The moment I saw the comic book pages mingled in with the text pages, I was hooked. The fact that the story itself involves a young girl moving into a new house that is supposedly haunted and sets about to solve the mystery - well, that was just icing on the cake, as they say!
I am not familiar at all with the author, Cherie Priest, nor the artist, Tara O'Connor; however, after this book, I may have to see what other projects on which they have worked. I just hope Priest's other works are not quite as whiny at this one. What I mean to say is that, while I thoroughly enjoyed the story and the underlying mystery, Priest gave her protagonist, Denise Farber, one main characteristic - she was always whining. The house is a dump. There's no air conditioning. The house is falling apart. She does not want to be there. The house is a junk heap. She has an old cell phone. The house will never get fixed. You get the drift. She is always whining and complaining, and after a while, it starts to grow tiresome. Then again, perhaps that is what Priest was going for - perhaps she wanted a main character that was not the perfect go-getter, "I'm going to solve this mystery" type of person. Instead, we get a very typical teenager who has been uprooted from the life she's known, torn away from the friends she's made, and thrust into a wholly unwanted situation. In that context, perhaps Denise is exactly who she's supposed to be.
For me, however, it is the supporting cast that I fell in love with. Pizza delivery guy, Norman, who Denise finds to be very hot. Geeky neighbor, Terry, who is totally into hunting down some ghosts. High-and-mighty teen queen, Dominique, who is not too keen on another white family moving into the neighborhood with ideas of "fixing it up." The most unlikely of friends, and yet over the course of 200 or so pages, Priest manages to not only breathe life into this ragtag mix of teens, but also shows the reader that sometimes you can't judge people at face value.
And the mystery - well, the mystery is a real doozy that had me guessing pretty much up to the very end. The nail house (as the towns people call it) seems to have two resident ghosts - one of them good, one of them bad. One of them a man, one of them a woman. One of them a comic creator, one of them...well, no one is quite sure, since she disappeared a few months before the comic creator was found dead. In her house. The nail house. And when Denise and Terry find an unpublished comic by that very creator in the attic, they soon discover that the comic is more than what it seems. Events in the comic seem to be happening in real life. It is a coincidence, or is it a supernatural case of life imitating art? That is exactly what Terry finally convinces Denise they need to find out!
The decision to actually insert the comic pages of art/story into the book, in the moments when Denise and Terry are reading the comic they found - giving the reader the opportunity to read the comic right along with them - was pretty ingenious. We, the readers, read the same pages as Terry and Denise, and we only read portions at a time, as they do, so we only know as much as they do. Which helps build the suspense, build the mystery, and build the clues that will ultimately answer the question - just what the heck is going on in nail house?!
A little bit of a slow start, but a definite good read.
RATING: 8 young blond haired men in distress out of 10 for a unique spin on the haunted house tale
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