Buy it here:
Synopsis:
A social media influencer with a secret past buys a murder house to renovate, but finds more than she bargained for behind the peeling wallpaper in this gothic psychological debut.
Sarah Slade is starting over. As the new owner of the infamous Black Wood House—the scene of a grisly murder-suicide—she’s determined that the fixer-upper will help reach a new audience on her successful lifestyle blog, and distract her from her failing marriage.
But as Sarah paints over the house’s horrifying past, she knows better than anyone that a new façade can’t conceal every secret. Then the builders start acting erratically and experiencing bizarre accidents—and Sarah knows there’s only so long she can continue to sleep in the bedroom with the bloodstained floor and suffer the mysterious footsteps she hears from the attic.
When menacing notes start appearing everywhere, Sarah becomes convinced that someone or something is out to kill her—her husband, her neighbors, maybe even the house itself. The more she remodels Black Wood House, the angrier it seems to become.
With every passing moment, Sarah’s life spirals further out of control—and with it, her sense of reality. Though she desperately clings to the lies she’s crafted to conceal her own secrets, Sarah Slade must wonder . . . was it all worth it? Or will this house be her final unraveling?
Review:
The premise of Lisa M. Matlin’s debut thriller, The Stranger Upstairs is strong from the start. Sarah Slade and her husband Joe have bought Black Woods House to renovate and resell. This house has not been lived in for 40 years, after a man murdered his family and himself inside. Strange things start happening to Sarah, and soon she is wondering how safe she is in the house. Even though it desperately needs renovations, the house does not seem to want to be fixed.
Sarah is a great character, a therapist who has one bestselling self-help book and is supposed to be working on a second, a marriage counselor, a fledgling Instagram influencer, and completely unreliable. As the novel unfolds, Sarah unravels. She descends into deeper paranoia, with the town hating her because they do not want Black Woods House to be occupied but demolished, and her husband becoming more and more distant, Sarah really falls apart. The lies build up, and we are left with a person who was never as she seemed.
Thrillers rely heavily on big revels and plot twists. I like novels that reveal too much at the beginning more than novels that wait until the end to have the big twists. I like that the narrator has to figure out how to deal with the new information. This is why I enjoyed The Stranger Upstairs more than many other thrillers. The big reveal is halfway through the novel, and the second half is figuring out how the fallout is going to effect the rest of the book. During the entire second half, Sarah’s actions get stranger and more erratic until the inevitable happens.
The Stranger Upstairs might not win any awards, but it really is a fun novel. I enjoyed it more than I expected, and this was one of those novels that seemed to move faster and faster the more I read. There are some things that make this more enjoyable as a physical read than an audiobook. The police reports and news articles intercut between chapters are from the future so the timeline gets a little screwy, and Matlin relies heavily on fonts to show the difference between blog posts, notes, and the action following them. These things worked well in print, but I have not heard good things about the audiobook. Keeping this in mind, The Stranger Upstairs is a short, fun, fast paced, satisfying story, and I loved every minute of it.
ghostvillehero 