Harmony House: A Gripping YA Supernatural Horror Thriller of Family Trauma and Terrifying Escape

Great Book! Loved it Nic!! Can't wait for your next book. xoxo Suzy

Loved his other work and this was of the same caliber. Great story with enough twists to keep you on the edge of your seat.

A page turner mixed with a little of The Shining and Firestarter. But ultimately felt like something was missing. Good concept and solid writing.

I don't often write book or film reviews for content, as I think those who do often forget that authors and stories don't actually owe them anything. Like a story? Great. Don't like it? Say why in a productive critique. But attacking it as if the author intended to personally disappoint you or waste your time is merely ego. When I read a story I think is terrible, I just move along. So here's my effort, because in reading the other reviews of Harmony House, I got the impression that people forgot (at least a little bit) that this is a young teen book. It says right on the Amazon page that it's for readers as young as 8th grade - ages 13-14, where I'm from. It says right on the dust jacket TEEN. It's not going to entertain minds with adult maturity and experiences the way we expect adult novels to. I'm 36, I read this because I wanted to see what Nic Sheff came up with, and I liked his other books (including Schizo). It's not the best written story, no. But it does serve a very important purpose. When I was a teen, I inhaled books. I remember exactly ONE story in which any main character(s) had a substance abuse problem, nevermind a teen addict. Maybe general content has changed with time, and this is no longer the case. This is not a story about addiction, but adding that element in fills a void. At the very least, it creates just one more opportunity for a young person to recognize a substance abuse problem in themselves when maybe they hadn't so far. It took a character in the story a little while to see withdrawal and dependence in herself. Remember The Outsiders? S.E. Hinton wrote it because she noticed the lack of literature in her own high school curriculum which represented a segment of society that was very relevant in her own life. I see Nic Sheff as doing something similar with teen addict characters. He may not be the first, but every such story helps. Additionally, this story also incorporates societal ills of religious zealotry and the lack of varied addiction treatment options. Even as an adult, this generated emotional responses for me. As for the writing style, it can be disjointed, chaotic, and jumpy. But so can trying to think with a drug-addled brain, which one character often does. As for it being a horror story, well I've been reading adult "horror" since I was 11/12. I have never been scared by a "horror" story. They are only psychological thrillers: stories which explore the twisted human psyche and its capacity for evil, abuse, bizarre possibilities, and failure. Which, in my opinion, this story does. It's not a great book, but it's not terrible. Give it one chance, if you are at all interested. And remember, it's a young adult book. Read it for what it is and not what you want it to be.

The book is all right, especially considering it's written for a young audience. However, I feel many points could've been delved into deeper. Did the main character's mom also have special abilities (what was that incident at the pool about?)? Was the father always disturbed or was it his time and experiences in that house that made him that way (and a couple of other things I can't discuss without spoiling the plot)? There were some good twists towards the end, so that saved the story.

This was one of those books that I have been looking forward to since I read the synopsis and saw the cover and just failed epically. Where should I begin? From the massive plot holes and the confusing mindset of Jen, the main character, I finished the book going "What just happened and what did I just read? I couldn't even write a review without massive spoilers that I'm posting on my blog page but I won't post here. There is no way for me to write this review without spoilers. I'm also going to apologize now and say I HATE writing one star reviews but because of how bad this is written, I need to warn people away from this book. This was a confusing jumble of questions with no answers and the lack of any real type of horror. I wish I had been warned before picking up this book and saved my money. I feel sad because this sounded like it had huge potential but just failed so badly.

It was a very good book!!! It kept you interested and was suspenseful!!!

Nothing is plumb, level, or square in Sheff's Harmony House, mostly because it's a badly built amalgam of the Overlook, Hill House, and the Winchester Mystery House. Those are big foundations to fill, and frankly this tale doesn't have anywhere near the horror square footage. In 1997, Jennifer Noonan and her recently widowed father move to a small town in New Jersey, where her father has accepted a position as caretaker - wink, wink, nudge, nudge - of Harmony House, an old estate with a creepy past the locals don't like to talk about and which has been converted to an inn. Naturally, strange things start happening as soon as they move in - there's a wacky bit with a self-censoring copy of the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi on top of the more run-of-the-mill apparitions - and Jen's father becomes increasingly unhinged. If that sounds a bit familiar, it's because it is. Sheff pointedly references The Shining multiple times, one supposes in order to convince us this is an homage rather than a rip-off. I haven't decided if Jen's nascent poltergeisty powers are channeling Jackson's Eleanor or King's Carrie, but her father's over-the-top religiosity points to the latter. His characterization is particularly distasteful, but everyone's fairly flat or unlikeable, including our girl Jen. (Who's also abusing prescription pills, which I'm guessing is supposed to make her either interesting or potentially unreliable as a narrator, but doesn't manage to do either convincingly. Maybe it's just in there to remind us this guy wrote Tweak?) All of which I could have likely overlooked had there been any true creep or crawl to this tale, but the ghosties do precious little, and are mostly in flashback. This is the first book of Sheff's I've read, so I'm unclear on whether it's representative of his style in general or if he was trying for something different with the staccato narration. What I do know is that he went pages with every sentence being its own paragraph - particularly toward the beginning of the novel - which was not only jarring to read, but distracting. Eventually I stopped reading and just started flipping pages to see how far it would go on before we had a thought or scene complex enough to require a multi-sentence paragraph. Spoiler: it took a while. I'm not the kind of girl who DNFs, but were I the type, this would have been a serious contender for a chuck across the room.

...But seriously though, but they do write it in a way that although the depiction of Christianity isn't extreme, but like , I don't know fundamentalist or what not feels believable and is interesting to read. But this book isn't just about Christianity being...douche lol, in general the plot is really interesting and feels really clever, and I didn't guess any of the plot points before they happened. Haunted house stories stories are a dime a dozen, but this certainly doesn't feel like a generic bland ghost story. I thought the characters were all well developed and interesting, and obviously it could just be me, but even the dad, who is a fundamentalist Christian didn't really feel too one dimensional or anything, he is shown as having a nice side, even if it's the rarely seen side of him. And I think the book does a good job of portraying him as at least believing, in his mind, he's doing the right thing. So yeah, there's nothing really groundbreaking about this book, if you've read even a few haunted house stories previously, you'll most likely have seen the plot points, tropes etc in this book before. But this book puts them to good use, and it was enjoyable to read, which is the main thing right?