The Visitors
By Catherine Burns
Gallery/Scout Press, 9781501164019, September 26, 2017, 304pp.
The Short of It:
Once you figure out who the “visitors” are, you quickly realize how horrible the situation is.
The Rest of It:
Marion lives with her older brother John. She’s a spinster and the two live a somewhat quiet life. Mostly because John is not the most social of people. Together, they live in a run-down mansion and although Marion sometimes dreams of life outside its walls, she is too self-conscious of herself to make any friends of her own and why bother anyway? No one would care to know her the way she looks. She’s plain, old and completely uninteresting.
But the real reason she stays close to home is because her brother John is different. Disturbed, I should say. He doesn’t approve of her having any friends and he is unable to make any of his own given his harshness and lack of manners.
Things change when The Visitors come.
Without giving the secret away, the entire book focuses on The Visitors and how they’ve come to inhabit Marion and John’s house. There are dark things going on within the house and it takes Marion a really long time to figure them out. This was rather infuriating to me as a reader but it was interesting too because Marion’s reaction to it all is not what you’d expect.
Catherine Burns does a decent job of “keeping the secret” and I found myself pretty absorbed by Marion and John’s situation but ultimately the ending was a little rushed. It’s being compared to Room and I can see that comparison but the tension is not as high in this one.
Source: Review copy provided by the publisher via NetGalley.
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