The Stray Reader

Author:	Philip Alexander Baker
Genre(s):	➡️ Horror ➡️ Paranormal
Series? Series Order:	✅ Yes Book 1 of 2
Goodreads Rating:	⭐ 3.59 (797 ratings; 171 reviews)
Personal Rating:	⭐ 1.5 / 5 Overall

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🛑 Spoiler Warning 🛑

I might be recounting events, characters, and themes so THIS MIGHT BE FULL OF SPOILERS.

If you’d like to read a review with the spoilers hidden, kindly scroll to the bottom to read my spoiler-free summary in the ‘Final Thoughts’ section or head to my Goodreads post for a more detailed version with spoilers removed. You don’t need an account to read it. 🙂

BLURB

There is more going on at Hanging Hill Lane than simple mass killings.

Daphne Locke, eighteen and alone, is back in her old childhood house as a sequence of brutal killings moves closer. Powerless policemen break down and cry, tortured by the most horrific crimes they have ever seen.

Murders are not the only darkness on the street. Creepy neighbours act impossibly. Dogged Jehovah’s Witnesses prophesy and stalk. Daphne wonders if she’s going mad, or if there truly is something real and insidious at play.

Perhaps the fresh grief of her mother’s death is testing her sanity. Perhaps her childhood night terrors were real. Perhaps rumours of the supernatural at Hanging Hill Lane were true all along. What a terrible time for a killer to come knocking.

Source: Goodreads

🌟Review (1.5/5) 🌟

I’m so sorry but this book was so bad that this is going to be a rant piece. I really wanted to like it because the cover and the prologue showed so much promise but there’s hardly anything else to like.

The writing style is so discomfiting. The scenes feel very much like they were individually written then spliced next to each other instead of having one, fully flowing story. Because of that, the characters’ words and actions feel so mechanical that it’s laughable.

For example, after the first murder the police goes door to door, understandably, to investigate. But they didn’t even check for an alibi when they knocked on Daphne’s door. They just assured her that everything’s gonna be alright and then comes back around to ask her if she’s seen or heard anything weird. Sure, this girl whose recently deceased mom comes back home then a neighbor dies the next morning and you don’t feel the need to check where she was during the time of the murder? Also, isn’t it police policy not to give promises to not give false hopes? The police behavior is just so weird the entire story. To protect her, they barricaded her windows (???) and locked a police officer inside the house (who’s allowed to sleep on a protection duty???) with her without a patrol outside. No, I didn’t miss the whole possession plot in that department. I just think the characters were dumb not to question their sanity especially when an inspector says right to your face “…we have absolutely no reason to believe that there is any kind of threat beyond what has happened. And that’s all in the past now.” after two families were massacred in the neighborhood. Plus, never mind that after a police officer guards Daphne for the entire evening he disappears; Daphne never becomes a suspect.

Another example is Sara. The moment she comes to see Daphne for her first visit, only Daphne spoke for around two pages and Sara didn’t even speak to show some sort of rapport between the two of them before they were interrupted by the police. Daphne, after narrating in the first few chapters how much of an outsider she is and having only Olive as her friend, suddenly has a childhood friend knocking on her door with a newborn baby and there’s no warm or comfortable conversation happening to break the ice with the reader. All of Sara’s visits had been so cold that I didn’t want to believe these two have some sort of friendship at all. In fact, while all these murders are happening in the neighborhood, Daphne had a night terror where an entity literally tells her that Sara and Alfie are gonna die and her first instinct upon waking up isn’t to call her so-called childhood friend to check if she and her baby are okay. But of course, I had to believe that they’re great childhood friends because the narrator keeps saying that. Which brings me to the biggest ick of all:

This very much missed the “show, don’t tell” writing technique for me. Every emotion and personality that a character has in a scene have all been narrated in a weird switching pattern between third person and first person perspective. This paragraph infuriated me the most:

Now, imagine a rope had been tied around Andrew’s ankles and his feet yanked hard from under him, his flailing body dragged out of the room and speedily across the carpet. That’s exactly what it looked like to Daphne.

It’s such a weird fourth wall break. I don’t know how else to explain it. At about 80% I just gave up trying to take it seriously. At this point, the narrator is just going off about how this is Daphne’s come-to-Jesus moment without laying any groundwork.

She’d been so anti-supernatural because deep down, she’d been drawn to it, a part of it, and didn’t want that to be true.

There are literally 39 instances of ‘and then…’ in this novel. It very much feels like a friend telling you a story from a plot perspective and that’s the device used to move it along versus having an immersive experience.

At this point, I was just tired. The ‘plot twist’ didn’t even matter. The ‘witches’ were all behaving in such a cartoonish manner that I saw that plot point miles away. There were also other things that at this point I can no longer tell if they were just plain unnecessary to the plot or just poorly connected – the painting, the mannequins, the hare, the doorbell. I was just done.

Final Thoughts

The cover is great, the prologue and epilogues are chilly, but everything else is disappointing. The narration style wasn’t able to develop any character, deliver a scene effectively, and deliver a satisfying plot progression. I will just reiterate that the writing style is so discomfiting.

If you feel inclined to check it out, ‘The House on Hanging Hill Lane’ is currently available in Kindle Unlimited.