Review: The Drowning House
I picked this up because I remembered that I liked the last Cherie Priest book I read without remembering all the details. The Drowning House turned out to be a well wrought supernatural thriller set in a modern Pacific Northwest.
To clarify the “supernatural thriller” label: it’s somewhere on the boundary between horror and action. There are plenty of very spooky scenes, including the initial chapter, that will scratch itches for scares. But in the end it’s about a showdown between Good and Evil with outsiders in over their head, a fair amount of derring do, and suspenseful confrontations.
What makes this all work for me is Priest’s pacing. The early more horror-centric chapters really drop us into the unknown waters of whatever creepy events are coming, but without filling in any useful details. We have some of the questions and then we meet our protagonists. Priest strings us along, letting both the players and the situation reveal themselves in good hair-raising time. Until suddenly the reader realizes that the spookfest has become an actioner and that they really do care about these folks who are caught up in it. I had a lot of fun.
Strongly recommended.