The blurb:
A violent storm washes a mysterious house onto a rural Pacific Northwest beach, stopping the heart of the only woman who knows what it means. Her grandson, Simon Culpepper, vanishes in the aftermath, leaving two of his childhood friends to comb the small, isolated island for answers--but decades have passed since Melissa and Leo were close, if they were ever close at all.
Now they'll have to put aside old rivalries and grudges if they want to find or save the man who brought them together in the first place--and on the way they'll learn a great deal about the sinister house on the beach, the man who built it, and the evil he's bringing back to Marrowstone Island.
From award-winning author Cherie Priest comes a deeply haunting and atmospheric horror-thriller that explores the lengths we'll go to protect those we love.
First up, I'm a huge fan of Cherie Priest's books; I like her range, going from southern gothic like The Toll to fun murder mysteries like Grave Reservations and, no matter where she's writing on that spectrum, she's great at drawing characters and building mood.
The Drowning House gets going with a bang in the first chapter, then settles down to a steady pace in the first half to two thirds of the book. It's structured similarly to IT, switching back and forth between Leo and Melissa in the present and them plus Simon as children and adults through the years. The flashback sections show the genesis and growth of the space between Leo and Melissa; the present sections show the results of them. This felt like the least successful aspect of the novel to me, which was a surprise; Priest is usually bang on when it comes to writing characters and interactions. But, while the age gap in the past felt real, the development of a sorta-kinda love triangle didn't work for me — the idea that the primary driver of the gap between Leo and Melissa was both of them competing for Simon's love didn't feel as real as the age difference in childhood and then just growing apart. Simon and Marrowstone Island was the connection between them. Leo and Melissa having separate crushes on Simon felt real...but the idea of them hanging onto them and still arguing about it thirty years later felt a lot less so.
Balanced against the relationship between Leo and Melissa was the relationship between Mrs Culpepper and...sorry, here be spoilers:
...her sister, Alcesta. While Leo and Melissa's relationship is mostly running on goodwill with a few spiky moments, the relationship betweens Mrs Culpepper and Alcesta is downright aggressive. But again, this felt oddly sketched in; we dont' even find out about Alcesta's existence until two thirds of the way through the book, and we get very little detail about where the dislike came from or how it played out.
The plot of the story is solid; we get information through both the present-day and flashback sections about the mysterious house that washes up on the shore in a massive storm. As Leo and Melissa search for information in the present, the flashback sections fill in more information about Mrs Culpepper and get our clues that there's more to her than meets the eye, even if the kids are surprisingly uncurious about her abilities. I get that kids can be accepting of some weird shit — but Simon and Melissa at least are older and, come on, if your grandmother/friend's grandmother comes out with facepaint and a horn in response to a near drowning, aren't you going to ask some questions? But, okay, aside from that, the story is mostly solid and there's a steady uncovering of information to find out the origin of the house, and what needs to happen to destroy it, and why it needs to be destroyed.
The story finishes with an epilogue, detailing Mrs Culpepper's original attempt to destroy the house. This felt unnecessary to me; we'd gotten all the ideas in it given in the story albeit in recollection rather than as it was happening. To me, it felt more like Priest wrote the section as a flashback, it didn't fit in the story as it developed, so it survived as the epilogue. Didn't quite work for me.
Overall, enjoyable but with a few less successful aspects.
Started: 6 February 2025
Finished: 9 February 2025
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