Zoe’s Haunt is a short horror story.
Zoe and her friends love doing crazy things
for Halloween. This year Zoe has promised them something new. She has tested
out an app that leads you around a haunted house – all in the comfort of your
own home and plans on blindfolding her friends and taking them on the journey.
As the app begins and the story deviates somewhat from what she remembers, she blames
it on AI. However, as friends start disappearing and then turning up dead, this
Halloween is going to be the one that tops them all.
I grabbed this one night to read during
loadshedding and was disappointed that it was so short (I didn’t realise it was
a short story when I started reading as it ended at 64% of the total space).
The premise was interesting and the idea that the app was taking them to a
different place, while not plausible (but then again what is on Halloween), was
something to look forward to. However, I felt really let down at the end of the
book.
Some of the scenes are very dialogue heavy,
and it seemed as though in certain sections each character had to add a line in
turn to the conversation. So, you’d find line after line of Zoe said, Ben
replied, Juan added, Rina said, Darren exclaimed, etc. etc. It started to
remind me a bit of The House of Twelve by Sean Davies but didn’t quite have the
reasoning behind it. Unfortunately, I felt a bit flat about the story as it
wasn’t long enough for me to build a connection with any of them. I wish what
the app takes them to had a bit more of a backstory to it, but it was more like
this happened and then this happened. And since the paragraphs were very short
(many pages with just one line or going directly between speech), the action
felt very choppy and didn’t lead up to enough suspense. I also think that because
some of the characters irritated me, I didn’t feel anything when they
disappeared.
I was a great attempt at a horror story
with a good basic idea but it left me hanging and feeling somewhat unfulfilled.
I’ll have to try another of the author’s stories to see if a longer one draws
me in more…
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