Just in time for Halloween, Malice House will give you chills up your spine, have you seeing monsters in your dreams and put your imagination into overdrive. For those who love twists and turns haunted houses, monsters, and a good mystery…enter at your own risk! You will not be disappointed.
Haven Marbury is cleaning out her late father’s house, Malice House. Her father was a best-selling author with a cult-like following. An illustrator herself, she has never quite understood the lure her father had to readers. Although his career included a Pulitzer Prize, his final year was filled with dementia, hearing voices in the walls, under the bed and seeing monsters.
But as Haven is up in the attic, she finds a handwritten manuscript called Bedtime Stories for Monsters. As she begins to read the stories, she can’t tell if they were created years ago or in her father’s later years when his mind was beginning to go. Why was the manuscript hidden away?
Haven, who needs money desperately, as she has just left her abusive husband, decides she will sell the manuscript to a publisher, hopefully making enough money to assist her own career as an illustrator and give her the financial freedom she needs. She goes to the local coffee shop where she knows the couple who own it helped her father get his other stories published. But they become quite obsessed with seeing the manuscript which makes Haven nervous. She’s not sure she can trust them.
She makes the decision with the help of an employee at the coffee shop to make her own calls and sell the manuscript as a package of sorts with her illustrations, sort of like a father, daughter collaboration. And then she begins to draw replicas of what she feels the monsters in the stories would look like.
And that’s when things begin to get really weird.
She uncovers a group who call themselves the Ink Drinkers who meet and are obsessed with her father’s writings. A barista at the coffeeshop goes missing. And then the deaths begin. Some supposedly caused by an animal in the woods. All the while she has decided she has a bit of a crust on her next-door neighbor after she accidently hits him with her car. Cute, but a bit quirky, she sees him out in the middle of the night doing something in his backyard.
Haven soon discovers nothing in her own life is what she has always been led to believe and monsters are unfortunately real, and they are looking to kill her. Because her father kept terrible secrets, she now must pay the price, perhaps with her own life and everybody’s around her. Who are the monsters and what did she do to call them?
Malice House is spooky, haunting and includes everything you want in a story to go bump in the night. Boo!!
Thank you #NetGalley #HyperionAvenue #MeganShepherd #MaliceHouse for the advanced copy.
Lisa's Cubby 