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There's Someone Inside Your House by Stephanie Perkins
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

TW for hazing, blood, mentions of drugs/suicide

I was looking for a fast-paced thriller that would keep me on my toes, and this didn't fulfill that itch of mine. I was dissatisfied with lots of the things that were going on with the climax and the way that the characters were introduced. The premise is basically your classic teen serial killer in a small town who’s running around in the town on the loose and is terrifying everyone who lives there.

The way that the killer was revealed was extremely anticlimactic, which was a really big disappointment to me because I had high hopes whence the plot was building up bit by bit. At the point where it feel flat, it stopped feeling entertaining to me and instead started to get repetitive. One murder after the other, the next one getting more gruesome as they come, and nothing was really happening on the law enforcement side it seemed (which was one unrealistic aspect of this whole thriller.)

Also, could we please talk about how most of this book is focused on the romance, the making out and sex scenes, instead of being that nail biting thriller that I was expecting. I understand that Perkins has previous experiences that solely focus on contemporary romance, but this isn’t the place to make that this main thing. It just rubbed me the wrong way, because it felt like the plot of the murders was put on the back burner while our MC was having drama and trying to figure out her relationship problems. It got boring really quick, really fast, and not only that but it took away from the actual “slasher scary” part itself.

All of the victims that were in this weren’t introduced early enough for us to give time to care about them. How this was written was we would learn of the existence of this person, and on the next page they would be slashed and dead. I would have loved for the author to rather develop their personalities and interests, etc. before she pulled them away because that just felt like lazy work.

Another thing that I absolutely had zero interest in was Makani’s secret. The whole book there is some foreshadowing and lead up to this big mysterious event, but even once the story spilled out I just thought that it wasn’t worth the on-page time of constantly talking about it. In all, it didn’t even make a centimeter of difference on the page or in my viewing of her as a character. One pro that we could be talking about is that our main character is half-Native Hawaiian and half African-American, which is something that I could always appreciate.

There are 0 scary moments where I actually felt scared, even though I tried reading this whole thing in the dark. I honestly don’t even know why the publisher would market it as “horror” because that seems like it’s setting the book up for a failure of false expectations.

**Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.**

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