Well, this was utterly dreadful, wasn't it? And I don't mean that in a good way.

There's so much wrong with this, that the somewhat slightly coherent wrap-up in no way justifies the crap the reader has to wade through in the first 90% to get there.

I don't want to spoil anything for anyone wanting to read this, so I'll just say this: The book is split into three parts, the first being about 75% of the book, and, while it starts with a bang, it swiftly goes down the nonsensical hill from there, hitting every bump and pothole along the way.

There was a social media post that went around a year or two ago where the poster said something along the lines of, "this book feels like the writer was making up as they went along" and there's some sort of sarcastic response from a big name author that basically says, "Ummm...who's gonna tell him?" It's played for laughs, and it is rather humorous. However, I understand exactly what that original poster was saying now.

By the end of this first section, it feels like Nesbo literally had no plan, no plot, no idea of what he was going to write next and so just barfed out whatever showed up in his noggin at that particular moment. The plot holds no logic, it's just a mess of "this happens, then this happens, then this"... Characters change their minds too easily. Things happen that are utterly ridiculous.

But wait, you think that's bad? Wait'll you hit the section section. It's far shorter, but it's even more ridiculous. I don't know that I've ever got to within 30 pages of the end of a book and decided it wasn't worth finishing, but I've never come closer to doing it than with this book. As bad as the first section was, the second was far worse. Nesbo piles ridiculousness on top of ridiculousness until it's a teetering tower that he really doesn't have any way out of.

Instead, he jumps to the third and final section, which appears to be the justification for the previous two bits.

I understand what he was trying to do, but the experiment was an abject and utter failure. If you're going to go the route this book went, then you have to build a strong, coherent, and frankly brilliant story to build up to it.

Something along the lines of what was done in The Usual Suspects is my first thought.

Nesbo...did not do this. He had elements that he slapped together. He moved the characters from one element to the next. But it was not an entertaining story, it was not a coherent story, and it was not a good story.

This was awful.

Last year, it took until August to find the worst book I read all the way through. This year, it happened within the first three days of April. ( )

A different style of Jo Nesbo book-- sort of retro horror, with a touch of YA, but I enjoyed it. ( )

An enjoyable triptych of a book. ( )

I've always liked Jo Nesbo's writing style and the way that great imagination can create a story that stays with the reader long after the book is closed. Sometimes it stays TOO much:)...but to be honest...with this one I am still very much confused, and it hurts my head to try...so I stopped trying. We find ourselves in the town of Ballantyne, and we meet Richard Elauved. Richard is a 14-year-old boy who takes a great deal of pleasure in bulling his classmates. He tricks Tom into going into a phone booth and gets him to call Imu Jonasson. Neither boy knows Imu Jonasson...it's part of Richrd's fun...a random person whose name he picks out of the phone book. Now the story begins to become strange as the phone takes a mind of its own and digs into Imu's flesh and eats him alive until all traces disappear. I don't think that phones are supposed to behave like this and neither does Richard...so he goes to the police. Of course, they don't take him seriously, and he can't persuade them that he's telling the truth. First of all, they can’t even find Jonasson’s name in the phone book...and they come to the conclusion that Tom must have drowned in the river. In the first part of the story, all the main characters are teens. Then as it moves along, fifteen years have passed, and we find Richard attending a class reunion. Now he is also the author of the novel, The Night House... the story of himself and Tom. He says that it is “the teenage horror novel that changed my life.” He tells people at the reunion that he came to apologize for having bullied everyone, yet all his fellow classmates insist he’d always been a good kid...not the nasty bully he’d portrayed in his famous book. Now we have the problem of determining what is going on and who is right. Creepy things continue to happen, a death by hanging, blood seeping down a car window, and even someone transforming into a cockroach...you know, all the standard horror fare.... though the cockroach is a new one for me. What adds to this bewilderment, is when we learn that Richard had invented the surname “Elauved” for some strange reason. Now we don't know if anything he has told us is true or is the detritus of his obviously fevered brain. Could it be a dream within a dream? Some of the evil comes from a surprising source, who advises young Richard, “If you really want to kill them, you have to do it twice. If you don’t, they come back.” I thought that an ill-fated fiend named Jack had the best line: “We’d actually prefer it if you tried to escape. It’s a well-known fact that adrenaline gives meat a bit of extra flavor.” I don't know any more than I did in the beginning, and I'm not at all sure that I really want to know. ( )

I was really into the summary of this book and thought it was going to be an amazing story, but I have to admit that I was a bit let down. It wasn't terrible but it just didn't live up to everything I had hoped. At least not until the last part of the book, which had a fun plot twist that made things more interesting. However, that part wasn't nearly long enough! The first half of this book is told by a fourteen year old narrator who is a terror! Of course, that makes half of it hard to comprehend. I spent a lot of time confused about whether or not things were actually happening or if I was just super confused. The best chapter of this part of the story was literally the first chapter which set a tone that I feel like the rest of the book didn't live up to.
I spent a lot of the time bored with this one and super annoyed by this kid. He wasn't a good or likable narrator in the slightest. Eventually we have shift in the timeline and I swear, things got even more unbelievable and hard to follow at that point. Like I said before the end of the book became super interesting and I wish it had been a bit more of a focus. I think it could have made things more interesting! The book has a magical element thrown in that I really struggled to understand because I don't think that it was explained very well. I truly wanted to like this book, but I think it just came across as medicore to me. Like it wasn't terrible but it isn't something I would read again. Events just felt too rushed, but also like nothing was happening. ( )