The Primroses Were Over

This was a decent read, all in all. 

There were some legitimate scares in several places, and I do love the general feel of a haunted house story where you have to learn about what happened in the house to solve what is currently happening. I was kind of creeped out while reading, which is what I wanted. 

The "Cam" portion of the story doesn't actually make a whole lot of sense. I completely buy that

I'm also not sure I buy them staying in the house or their weird refusal, despite everything that is happening individually to each of them, of any of them to believe the others about the paranormal activity going on. Okay, maybe there is some valid reason to stay in the house (even just "it's a horror novel" is a moderately valid reason, I guess), but why do we have to go through the whole rigmarole of "Oh, there is a perfectly rational explanation" every single time something happens? An awful lot of things happen, here. There is a certain point where unless the characters were exceedingly stupid (and they otherwise did not show signs of being so), they would have just plain started believing that weird stuff was still happening without having to disbelieve every single time. 

The constant harping on the language differences between American and British English was kind of annoying. I can only come up with two reasons for it to be done: either the author thought we readers were too stupid to understand the differences (and this is a book written for adults, for sure), or the author was desperately trying to stretch things out. I'm not sure which explanation I believe, though the latter does seem to have some further support in the sheer amount of exposition throughout. 

I did want to know about the background of the house. I was interested in the characters and the backstory. I didn't really need nearly as much of it as I got, and I certainly didn't need it info-dumped on me near the end of the story. That is the point where I am hoping for a build-up into some kind of climax, not for a sudden stroll down memory lane. The book was just plain too long in several places, honestly, and that almost never bothers me. 

I will pick up more books by James Herbert, for sure; this book is probably more negative than my reading merits, and I enjoyed it enough that I'm interested in more horror stories by him, but it had a few problems that were hard to overlook sometimes. If you're a fan of haunted house stories, though, this is absolutely worth a read.