This was a good creepy read! It escalated for me to the point I was staying up late at night to get through it!

It is about some friends that buy a house to turn it into a bed and breakfast. Little do they know that the house was once a convent and it is haunted. They begin to wish that they had not embarked on this endeavor as things start happening in the house.



This was a pretty scary read and it is like a train barreling down the tracks! You want to stop the train but then you don't as you want to see what happens next! New horror author for me and I am giving it a five star read for keeping me spooked! ( )

I love a good haunted house story. Shirley Jackson‘s The Haunting of Hill House remains one of my favorite novels and one of my favorite films (the original, of course). I was thrilled to finally read The Shining recently. It’s a classic for a reason and one of King’s best (and better than the film, in my opinion). And then there are the sillier haunted house films that I love, especially House on Haunted Hill (again, the original).

So, I was somewhat excited to receive a free copy of Chantal Noordeloos’ debut novel Angel Manor through LibraryThing‘s Early Reviewer program. Haunted house plus scary nuns? Sounds good to me.

And the general plot is decent. Our protagonist Freya inherits a large, old house from her aunt and goes to check it out with her best friends Bam and Oliver. They have plans to turn it into a hotel (it’s that big). But Freya is skeptical. Her aunt was disturbed, living here her whole life, and the house drove Freya’s mother away, terrified of it. Should they move in and rehab the place?

Not if you’ve read the prologue. All kinds of demony business has happened in this house over the years, and now that there’s fresh blood on the property (literally), it’s ready to do more.

With a set-up like that, and a pretty decent beginning, I was really disappointed that the book didn’t follow through. Noordeloos’s writing starts fairly strong, and for the first half of the book, the story’s compelling, but it lacks a mature voice and suffers what seems to be common with first novels, in that the writing loses its punch as things go along.

The story’s also an odd mix of soap opera and grotesque horror set pieces and it has trouble maintaining a balance between these elements. Part of the problem I had was that Noordeloos’s main characters feel more like teenagers than adults in their twenties, and I grew impatient with them, eventually caring more about what happens to the crew of workers (mostly real teenagers) who come in to work on the house. Maintaining suspense and horror is challenging, even more so when the reader doesn’t care about what happens to the main characters (doubly so, when the writer kills off the best one)

Another problem I had with Angel Manor was that the grotesqueness done to the female characters is much more gruesome (and this is a gruesome book) than what happens to the men. That’s a stereotype I’m tired of.

And then the ending just wouldn’t end. The final chapter finishes and the reader is faced with an epilogue and the reminder that this is the first book in a series. Endings are hard, but there should be one. ( )

This is certainly a book of horror. It was written well, but almost too horrifying for me. Not exactly my cup of tea. But if you like horror books, you'll probably love this one. ( )

I fell behind on reviewing this as a LibraryThing Early Review, and I had to request for it to be resent by the publisher. They did so immediately and kindly, but even though I enjoy the horror/thriller category, and was eager to read it, I found the the opening scene of nuns torturing and killing children to be one of my no-go areas, so I am unable to read on.
I see the other reviews mention this very scene with pleasure and praise so I am sure the book is great if you are good with the starting point.

I received this book from LibraryThing in exchange for my honest review.

I am a sucker for Gothic horror, and this book did not disappoint! Gore and nuns? Who'd have thought that they would go together so well?! From the bloody prologue, I was enthralled. I am definitely looking forward to the next book in the series! ( )