"The Invited" Book Review

By Jennifer McMahon

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My Rating: 4/5 stars

A couple, Helen and Nate, decide to give up their comfy city lives to move to the country and build a new life there along with a new house.

Luckily for them, they find the perfect piece of land.

Because you see…it’s haunted :O

Helen is a woman always looking to the past. She’s a history teacher who moves to the middle of nowhere to return to a simpler way of life. Meanwhile, her husband, Nate is much more science-focused and enamoured with the nature and isolation of their new place (well, it’s still just a trailer in the beginning).

So, it comes as no surprise that Helen immediately starts looking deeper into the local legend of Hattie which inevitably causes tension with Nate who is obviously far too sensible to believe in ghosts or superstition. Keeping with classic horror, things start to go missing from their trailer, screams in the woods in the middle of the night, a strange bundle left at their doorstep. Someone or something is trying to drive them away.

It’s a classic horror trope, isn’t it? Woman notices something is weird/off (because of course it is, it’s a horror), man calls her hysterical. It’s a classic for a reason, though and Jennifer McMahon manages to make the concept feel fresh.

Helen, inspired by the local legend of Hattie Breckenridge, begins incorporating different bits of local history into the house they’re building. Bricks from a factory where workers were killed, a wooden beam from the schoolhouse (one that had seen its share of tragedy). With every addition, Helen seems to awaken something within the house.

Olive is a teenager on a mission to find the mysterious treasure Hattie left behind. With her home life in disarray since her mother abandoned her, the treasure is her last hope of bringing her family back together. Unfortunately, the newcomers to town are building a house right where she is searching.

This book is far from the first book I’ve read of Jennifer McMahon’s. I love her writing. It’s so compelling and interesting. Her characters are always so vivid and the story concept never fails to hook me. I usually find she tends to fudge the endings a bit, but I really liked the ending to this book. This book is very eerie but I wouldn’t say it was scary, so if gore or frights aren’t your thing, then this is a good option for you. I had no problem reading this before going to bed...well almost no problem. It is still a ghost story, after all. And nobody’s out here reading ghost stories to sleep well!

So, have you read "The Invited" or any other book by Jennifer McMahon? If you have, please leave a comment below :)

Cheers!