Beneath the Stairs by Jennifer Fawcett

​Beneath the Stairs is an atmospheric suspense thriller with supernatural undertones. Right up my alley. And yet it turned out to be quite a peculiar reading experience, enjoyable throughout but somewhat unsatisfactory in the end. It’s as if the book didn’t quite hold up to the rear view introspection. All the ingredients were there, the writing was perfectly good, but (as this can be easily attributed to debut jitters) it leaned heavily toward excess in execution. Which is to say it was quite heavily overwritten and, if you consider it in its entirety, a lot of the plot aspects went underutilized. Obviously, it’s difficult to go into specifics without giving too much away, but…well, one can try.
    So, once upon a time there was a small town and in it, well, on the outskirts of it, there was a strange house, an octagonal shaped house with dark history and murderous past that stood abandoned and, as such places do, absolutely irresistible to local kids. Some went in and saw something in the basement that terrified them and continued to call back to them for years and decades since. 
     The main narrator, Clare, is one of those kids, now a grown woman, who comes back to her small town after finding out that her childhood friend went back to the basement and tried to commit suicide there. So yes, at its heart of hearts this is yet another one of those stories where the protagonist returns to their small town and its hidden evils after many years away.
      And yes, because it’s a thriller, it has the prerequisite time split narrative, where you can follow Clare as a teenager and as an adult. But then, because it’s also kinda sorta a horror story it also takes you back to different timelines with different narrators who have all had the distinct displeasure of staying at the Octagon House. And also, sometimes it takes you to a different narrator during present time. Which is all to say…too many cooks in the kitchen.
      The overall effect is busy. Too busy. To her credit, the author manages to juggle all those narrative balls, but it isn’t the easiest of tasks, because those balls are unbalanced. They work as individual self contained units, but when you consider them as a sum total, you realize that the past is simultaneously too drawn out and underplayed and in the end comes to a relatively minor haunting that has been blown out of proportion. The serial killer angle is all but buried in there. In fact, entirely too much of the story’s historical past has been sacrificed in favor of the formulaic present, including a romantic subplot and babies, babies, babies.  Also, the ending…it’s just too freaking easy. Just puff and burn your worries away…after all that. Way too easy.
       Had this been streamlined, it might have made for either a compelling if clichéd thriller or a compelling if clichéd ghost tale. As is it’s kind of a mess. A very readable and mostly enjoyable mess, but one that doesn’t hold up to the scrutiny of retrospect. Not terrible overall by any means and certainly shows promise, just very overdone. Take the Orpheus approach here, go through it, enjoy, but don’t look back. Thanks Netgalley.