The Apartment
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- CHF 5.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
From S. L. Grey comes this suspenseful psychological thriller.
Mark and Steph are struggling to move on with their lives after armed robbers broke into their home and brutalized them. Shaken, they decide to get away and leave their troubles behind. A house swap in Paris with a couple they meet online, the Petits, seems to provide the perfect escape. But upon arriving for a week's luxurious break, they find themselves in a festering, run-down apartment. And when Steph attempts to contact the Petits, she gets no answer.
Mark and Steph try to make the most of the trip, but they are unable to relax. After a series of increasingly unsettling events, they decide to return home. Yet when they arrive, neither of them can shake the feeling that there's now something sinister about their own house. As time passes, Mark is terrorized by a series of unsettling visions. But is it all in his imagination or is there a far more worrying explanation . . . ?
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.
