Review: Something Bad Happened Here

Something Bad Happened Here by Zoe Rosi
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Narrated by Andy Stevenson
Presented by Xpresso Book Tours

This started pretty dull and never really improved, unfortunately.

An okay listen in lieu of nothing else, but ultimately disappointing.

A woman moves to a new area after the death of her mother, wanting some time away from everything. Unfortunately, the cheap house she moves into was once the scene of a grizzly murder, and now strange things are happening that she can't explain.

Firstly, I'm not sure why we needed to go through all the boring process of her acquiring the house. Completely superfluous stuff, and the changing perspective didn't really add much.

There was a lot of excess stuff in this one that just contributed nothing to the story, so by the time the horror started to make itself known it wasn't enough to erase the tedium of the whole thing.

Then the time jumps around a little bit, making it hard to follow what's happening when.

I also had a problem with the narrator, and question the choice to have a male narrator on a book told from a female perspective. This guy made the ladies sound like ridiculous caricatures and it gave the book a sense of parody rather than anything dark or ominous. I wouldn't recommend the audio version for this reason. Perhaps in print there's a little more to get behind.

Some interesting ideas but poorly executed, and not really enough to make the excess stuff worth slogging through. Added to that, painful narration of the audio version. Okay in a pinch, but otherwise not much here.

With thanks to NetGalley for an audio ARC

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