The Girl From The Well

The Girl from the Well - Rin Chupeco

I was really expecting this to be scarier.

 

I did enjoy it quite a bit, but I picked it up because of the original version of the cover I saw, which looked like The Ring, and was expecting to be scared to pieces while reading it.

 

I managed to fall asleep.

 

Now, that is not completely the book's fault. I was not bored at any point during this, I was running extremely low on sleep and attempting a 24-hour read-a-thon at the time on top of that. However, I was hoping for something so scary I couldn't fall asleep, and it was disappointing in that regard.

 

The set-up was very intriguing, and the characters themselves were pretty well-done. I was hoping for some more background on our ghost, however. Or perhaps just for a different background, as the one we are eventually given is pretty well filled-in, it is just not as scary as I wanted.

 

Given Okiku is the narrator, the perspective on the other (or real?) main characters is a little out-of-touch, which I thought added to the book's charm. What she understood of any given situation and what we, as readers, understood was often quite different, and having her handling the supernatural bits and us getting the more normal bits was kind of fun. It was piecing together the whole of these characters and their lives.

 

However, she wasn't scary.

 

I know, I know, I'm harping on that, but that was my biggest problem with the book. It feels like it should be scary. I'm utterly petrified of The Ring and Ringu scared my sister and I so badly we had a week-long sleepover in my bedroom because sleeping alone was not an option. The narrator is pretty blatantly Sadako (this is even mentioned in the book), but she does not scare me. At all. Even when ripping up people. Which she does not do nearly enough, personally (wow, that is an extremely morbid sentence, but she is played up as a scary violent ghost, okay).

 

If you like the idea but are not generally a horror fan, go for it. It's really unlikely to scare you, and it is quite an interesting read. For those of us who do want scares, though, we'll have to find them elsewhere.