This book had an interesting concept, but the execution was very lackluster for me.

I honestly don't have much to say about this... An underwhelming experience all around. I love me a collection of horror-tinged short stories, but the way this was written was so matter-of-fact that the horror elements fell completely flat for me, and the themes of each story were so explicitly defined that I felt like I was being talked down to. The concept of an institute dedicated to housing haunted items is one with nearly infinite potential that never felt properly explored. Nearly every story was framed in an identical way, as a story being told to our nameless protagonist, and as a result, the stakes felt non-existent.

I also had quite a few problems with the writing. I already mentioned the straightforward writing style, but that's more of a personal preference; I don't like being held at arm's length emotionally when reading a book. What's less of a personal preference is the lack of clarity in a lot of these stories. Many of the characters we follow don't have names, so they're instead given identifiers like "the man", "the man's wife", "the man's friend's wife", "the man's friend's wife's family"... you can see how this would get really confusing, not to mention exhausting to read. And I'm getting really tired of saying this about 2025 releases... but there's editing oversight to the point of distraction. Subject-verb agreement errors, pronoun errors, the aforementioned lack of sentence clarity... Publishers, I'm begging you to stop with the quantity over quality approach and give your editors time to do their jobs.

Unfortunately, I'll probably have forgotten I even read this in about a week. 2.5/5.