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Synopsis:

A book deal to die for.

Five attendees are selected for a month-long writing retreat at the remote estate of Roza Vallo, the controversial high priestess of feminist horror. Alex, a struggling writer, is thrilled.

Upon arrival, they discover they must complete an entire novel from scratch, and the best one will receive a seven-figure publishing deal. Alex’s long-extinguished dream now seems within reach.

But then the women begin to die.

Trapped, terrified yet still desperately writing, it is clear there is more than a publishing deal at stake at Blackbriar Estate. Alex must confront her own demons – and finish her novel – to save herself.

This unhinged, propulsive, claustrophobic closed-door thriller will pull you in and spit you out…

Review:

Julia Bartz’s debut novel, The Writing Retreat, starts with a compelling premise. Five female writers are invited to the estate of Roza Vallo to spend a month writing a new book. Blackbriar Estate is also rumored to be haunted. The five writers are given the challenge to write a novel in thirty days, each other them working hard and the best novel is the winner. The main character Alex has writer’s block when she goes to Blackbriar. It does not help that an old friend, Wren, who had a falling out after a drunken night, is another of the contestants. Not only does Alex have to navigate this competition, but she should also try to mend the relationship with her old friend.

There is so much potential in this plot, and for the first half, it moves along as expected. When the story slowly shifts into a completely different second half, my interest evaporates. The second half pretty much abandons the first half, and I no longer care what happens to these characters. Let the ghosts get them, if the ghosts were really part the second half that is. My lack of engagement might be the fact that the most interesting parts of the first half, like the house being haunted, are pretty much abandoned. And the new story, about betrayal, psychopaths, and lies, is not compelling at all. 

The Writing Retreat would have also been better if I liked the writing more. I found Bartz’s writing style to be irritating and distracting. Her taglines for dialogues, which pretty much all follow the same formula, are amateurish and boring. And the excerpts of Alex’s novel within the novel are so uninteresting that I was really tempted to skip them, even though most are less than two pages long. Instead I read the words with no interest in what they were saying. By the last third of the novel, I just wanted to be done. I did not care about what happened to any of them. I wanted out of Blackbrair estate just as much as the girls did. This not the worst novel that I read this year, but it is close to the bottom of the list.