REVIEW: The Apartment (book) by S.L. Grey

The Apartment is horror. I think I bought my copy new.

Review:

Mark and Steph are a South African family still recovering, emotionally and financially, after a home invasion. Their marriage is starting to fracture, but they don't really have the money for a traditional vacation. Then Mark's friend Carla mentions house swapping, and they decide to give it a shot and set something up with a couple in Paris. There's some tension as Mark decides, without consulting Steph, that they should leave their daughter with Steph's parents while they're gone, but that turns out to be for the best as their vacation immediately shows signs of not being as advertised. 

The apartment in Paris is musty and awful, and almost all of the neighboring apartments appear to be abandoned. It also doesn't help that their credit card doesn't work, and that the only other person in the apartments seems to be a little crazy. When their nightmare "vacation" is finally over, it seems like their home might finally feel like a refuge again. Unfortunately, the "wrongness" from the apartment in Paris has somehow followed them home.

I had some issues with the premise. Would a couple still recovering from a home invasion willingly let strangers live in their home? I found it hard to believe. Carla mentioned that the house swapping site would allow them to check reviews of people and make sure they weren't swapping with anyone horrible, so it immediately gave me pause when neither Steph nor Mark seemed very bothered by the fact that this Paris couple had no reviews. Their reasoning was that they didn't have reviews either, but, again, there was that whole home invasion thing.

The apartment was indeed creepy, and pretty much everything about Steph and Mark's Paris experience screamed "this was a mistake." Their issues with their credit card at least made it believable that they couldn't immediately turn around and go home, or even go to a hotel. Seriously, they should've just booked a hotel to begin with, but then I guess there would have been no book.

About halfway through the book, the apartment is no longer an issue and Steph and Mark are back home, so that was kind of a letdown. I had wanted the apartment stuff to go on a bit longer, especially considering some ominous details like the splinter in Mark's foot that was progressively getting worse. 

Mark and Steph's issues, when they got home, reminded me a little of Nick Cutter and Andrew F. Sullivan's The Handyman Method, what with Mark gradually falling apart. That said, Mark and Steph weren't really anything like Trent and Rita. A lot of the second half of the book was about finding out about Mark and Steph's history, particularly Mark's - his marriage to Steph was actually his second, and he had some hangups about a child he'd had in his previous marriage and about Steph being 20 years younger than him.

The reasoning behind the ending made about as much sense as the reasoning behind the premise. It honestly made Steph look like a terrible person. I mean, would her daughter really care about the house she and her father lived in considering what happened there? Just abandon the place or have it demolished - don't make it someone else's little slice of hell. 

This was at least a quick read, but very flawed and not actually very scary.