I wasn't sure what to expect going into this book. I had seen a lot of mixed reviews, so I think I expected a very serious haunted house story. Man, Fuck This House is very much a parody, and the house's problems are a little different than you'd expect. Where haunted house stories personify the buildings the characters occupy, Man, Fuck This House takes this up a notch.

The characters themselves are your atypical 2.5 children (literally, as our mother, Sabrina states early on) white middle class family you tend to see in these things. Sabrina is a stay at home mother of 2, her younger son more than a little strange, and husband Hal she doesn't think too hard on her feelings for. She has a nice life. A nice, boring life. Until they move to Jackson Hill's suburbia.

I think overall, this book started out fine, through its building I found myself really digging it, and then its climax went a little mad, which I could handle but it was certainly odd, and had several moments of such tonal whiplash from the rest of the book that I closed it out wondering what the point really was? I just don't know I loved how that played out.

That said, I'd call my rating a 3.25, because overall I enjoyed the story. I wouldn't reread it though. And I'm going to count this as read because I don't feel called to read those extraneous short stories the reprint added in. I really have to be in the right mood to read short stories and I very much am not there right now. Maybe I'll go back and read them later on, though.

The first like.. 70% ish of Diavola was SOOO good. Like actually scary. I don't think a horror book has ever successfully creeped me out the way this one did, and multiple times too.

But then it lost some steam. It wasn't bad, just... a different vibe suddenly and no longer scary, it felt like a different book. Not bad necessarily but the sudden vibe switch was a little whiplashy and just very different to what came before it. The large part of the book set in the Italian countryside that was so creepy, unnerving, and horrendous (HER FAMILY UGGGH, too well written, I hate them xD). You could simply FEEL the grime and unease of that later part, my god.

While there are things I may have done a little differently were I writing this myself, I feel like Thorne did a great job overall. The creepiness... And how unputdownable it is? Damn. Well done. And the ending was satisfying enough! I could certainly recommend this one to folks who enjoy supernatural horror.

Great as always, though I didn't love the monster train setting of this floor (trains rarely do it for me in fiction) and halfway through just found I wasn't in the mood for it which slowed me down a lot. Took me a month to get to the last 3 hours of my audiobook. And on the audiobook front, great as ever, although they got a guest in for one character and his mic quality was not on a par with Jeff's, which felt a bit off. But that was only for one scene so not a major problem.

The story continues to ramp up and we're off to another floor for the next one. Excited to see what that brings but I will have a little break for now and listen to something different, come back to it in the right mood.

It feels like she very much used a thesaurus. There are a lot of side thoughts mid sentence so I just forget what the sentence was and commas all over the place breaking sentences up in strange ways and that just leaves me confused. There's this "voice of god" narrative I don't care for, and halfway through becomes first person (occasionally) which threw me off. It just feels like a mess... A shame, the characters and world are interesting and I'm intrigued by the story but I'm just not having a good time with the writing which is kind of a vital piece of book enjoyment.