"While the premise of this novel seemed interesting the novel itself has a lot of flaws..."

House Trap

by Mike Mauthor

Genre: Horror

Book Synopsis

Rachel Evans is a sixteen year old overachiever who would take nothing less than to achieve her goal of getting into Dartmouth College. But Rachel’s life would never be the same once she stepped into the house of Alicia Hausefalle, the most popular girl in Wedds High School. Rachel was there to tutor her. She never expected to meet two strangers who were ready to end her life.

Bec's Rating

Bec's Review

While the premise of this novel seemed interesting the novel itself has a lot of flaws making it read like the first draft of a book. There are many grammatical and punctuation errors throughout the story leading to quite a few sentences that just didn’t make sense and pulled you out of the story, sentences that would have been picked up if an edit of this work had been done by someone not as familiar with the story. Added to these errors was the fact that there are several times throughout the story where, despite the rest of the book being written in past tense, the author slips into present tense, another thing that an edit would have picked up.

Another fact that pulled me away from the plot of the story was the author’s tendency to use words that sound like they had been pulled from a thesaurus to make the story sound better, but which didn’t quite fit the situation. Not every synonym of a word means exactly the same thing and fits in the same sentences. An example of this was switching the word laughed for guffawed in regards to a group of teens mocking another. Rather than be impressed at the authors vocabulary I rather found myself questioning why laughed could not have sufficed when it would have fit so much better. This was coupled with the authors tendency to add unnecessary descriptive words to every description so that even the math teacher (who is mentioned maybe one) had shimmering eyes.

These are all things though that a simple edit can fix provided the author has someone they can trust to perform the task. And I believe the book may be worth the edit, even with these errors. That’s not to say that the plot itself is perfect, there are many times when I questioned some of the actions that occurred in the book in such a way that I would be drawn out of the story. The plot is far from perfect, but the problems with that are also something that an edit should pick up. To use my favourite word I believe that there is enough potential in this story that, with a critical edit, it may end up surprising even me. Until then this book should be treated as a first draft so that the reader goes in aware of the errors.

Disclaimer: Not recommended for children due to violence.