“No matter how many times I vowed to quit, every night I found myself with the candle lit, the ring on my finger, trying to get through to my dad. Because I needed to find him. I needed to tell him I was sorry I killed him.”
Willa and her mother are following her new Hollywood hotshot stepfather out to LA. They both hope it will be a chance for them to start over. To put to rest the notion that Willa will somehow be able to raise the spirit of her deceased father to apologize for her part in his untimely death.
However, instead of summoning her father, it seems she has summoned someone else. She starts seeing things that aren’t there—dead bodies in swimming pool, threatening messages on the wall, reflections in the mirror that aren’t hers.
At school, she meets Wyatt, who’s a little too interested in the serial killer that’s making news headlines, but as the details of the crimes start to line up with Willa’s visions, she realizes she may be the only one able to stop the killer before they take another victim.
“So much happened there…But it wasn’t the house’s fault. In a way it seems like the house was a victim too. Maybe it hated its own role. Maybe the house is what gave Paige the strength to resist. Maybe somehow the spirit of Diana Del Mar was fighting along side me the whole time I was fighting back.”
I don’t read horror. I always say “I will read anything…except horror.” I am not a fan of the genre at all. I don’t like being scared or creeped out. I have been plagued with weird dreams my entire life and anytime I’ve ventured close to this genre, I have regretted it. However, I would classify this as “horror-lite” or “unearthly murder mystery”, but it is the closest I have come to horror while still enjoying it. It had just the right level of creep.
I really loved this character. I feel she has a unique redemption arc. At the beginning of the book everyone thinks she’s one weird event away from losing her mind, but when the weird events literally come knocking at her door, she does not write it off as the insanity everyone accuses her of, but instead clicks into her rational brain to realize that while things are unorthodox, something very serious and very real is going on and needs attention.