Chantal Noordeloos

This was a good creepy read! It escalated for me to the point I was staying up late at night to get through it!

It is about some friends that buy a house to turn it into a bed and breakfast. Little do they know that the house was once a convent and it is haunted. They begin to wish that they had not embarked on this endeavor as things start happening in the house.



This was a pretty scary read and it is like a train barreling down the tracks! You want to stop the train but then you don't as you want to see what happens next! New horror author for me and I am giving it a five star read for keeping me spooked!… (mere)

I’ve always liked this author’s vision and, while I feel parts of this book could be improved, I love the themes and imagery used. In a book intended as horror for adults, portions contained a Young Adult feel, particularly the interactions between Freya and Bam, though this could be representational of the characters’ ages and therefore I felt distanced from them, feeling young women having gone through what these do they would grow up fast. This is the second in the Lucifer Falls series which began with Angel Manor which I preferred, and, though I feel this series could be more intense, it’s difficult not to like stories that contain the best of creepy things: a haunted manor, nuns, angels, and dolls. I looked back over the first book after reading the second and will eagerly check out the final instalment when it appears.… (mere)

I love a good haunted house story. Shirley Jackson‘s The Haunting of Hill House remains one of my favorite novels and one of my favorite films (the original, of course). I was thrilled to finally read The Shining recently. It’s a classic for a reason and one of King’s best (and better than the film, in my opinion). And then there are the sillier haunted house films that I love, especially House on Haunted Hill (again, the original).

So, I was somewhat excited to receive a free copy of Chantal Noordeloos’ debut novel Angel Manor through LibraryThing‘s Early Reviewer program. Haunted house plus scary nuns? Sounds good to me.

And the general plot is decent. Our protagonist Freya inherits a large, old house from her aunt and goes to check it out with her best friends Bam and Oliver. They have plans to turn it into a hotel (it’s that big). But Freya is skeptical. Her aunt was disturbed, living here her whole life, and the house drove Freya’s mother away, terrified of it. Should they move in and rehab the place?

Not if you’ve read the prologue. All kinds of demony business has happened in this house over the years, and now that there’s fresh blood on the property (literally), it’s ready to do more.

With a set-up like that, and a pretty decent beginning, I was really disappointed that the book didn’t follow through. Noordeloos’s writing starts fairly strong, and for the first half of the book, the story’s compelling, but it lacks a mature voice and suffers what seems to be common with first novels, in that the writing loses its punch as things go along.

The story’s also an odd mix of soap opera and grotesque horror set pieces and it has trouble maintaining a balance between these elements. Part of the problem I had was that Noordeloos’s main characters feel more like teenagers than adults in their twenties, and I grew impatient with them, eventually caring more about what happens to the crew of workers (mostly real teenagers) who come in to work on the house. Maintaining suspense and horror is challenging, even more so when the reader doesn’t care about what happens to the main characters (doubly so, when the writer kills off the best one)

Another problem I had with Angel Manor was that the grotesqueness done to the female characters is much more gruesome (and this is a gruesome book) than what happens to the men. That’s a stereotype I’m tired of.

And then the ending just wouldn’t end. The final chapter finishes and the reader is faced with an epilogue and the reminder that this is the first book in a series. Endings are hard, but there should be one.… (mere)