The Apartment
A Horror Story (Blumhouse Books)
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From Blumhouse Books, a haunting thriller about a troubled married couple whose vacation to Paris leads them into a nightmare.
"Dark and deeply disturbing. I'm still shuddering."--R.L. Stine
“An impressively compelling chiller… an ideal choice for late nights alone.” -- CultureCrypt
Mark and Steph have a relatively happy family with their young daughter in sunny Cape Town until one day when armed men in balaclavas break in to their home. Left traumatized but physically unharmed, Mark and Steph are unable to return to normal and live in constant fear. When a friend suggests a restorative vacation abroad via a popular house swapping website, it sounds like the perfect plan. They find a genial, artistic couple with a charming apartment in Paris who would love to come to Cape Town. Mark and Steph can’t resist the idyllic, light-strewn pictures, and the promise of a romantic getaway. But once they arrive in Paris, they quickly realize that nothing is as advertised. When their perfect holiday takes a violent turn, the cracks in their marriage grow ever wider and dark secrets from Mark's past begin to emerge.
Deftly weaving together two complex and compelling narrators, S. L. Grey builds an intimate and chilling novel of a disintegrating marriage in the wake of a very real trauma. The Apartment is a terrifying tour-de-force of horror, of psychological thrills, and of haunting suspense.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two boring characters lurch toward their fate in this listless contemporary horror novel from Grey (the writing team of Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg). Mark's shotgun marriage to trophy wife Steph, who's already haunted by the ghosts of Mark's failed first marriage, is further strained by a home invasion. A chance to reset by swapping their apartment in Cape Town, South Africa, for one in Paris, France, only makes matters worse. When Mark thinks, "I'm nothing but a clich ," he is sadly on the nose, as Grey doesn't give readers any reason to care about a whining sad sack who accidentally killed his daughter. Steph's jealousy and selfishness make her little better. The use of past-tense narration by Steph takes the mystery out of Mark's present-tense account, and the horror elements (a suicide, hallucinations) produce barely more than a yawn. The story is slow until the rush to a senseless final death and a buck-passing ending that disappoints instead of satisfying.
