After their Grandmother's death, Alexis and her siblings arrive at her house to clean and tidy up the vast, two-story French Colonial. During their purging and rearranging, Dante, their brother, ignores his cleaning duties and provides a sizeable antique jar he discovers filled with various skeleton keys. He convinces his sisters and wife to select and explore the house to find which keys open any of the doors within the hallways of the neglected mansion. As each family member chooses a key, it opens doors to their terrifying memories from which there is no escape.
Overall, this was a fairly solid book with a lot going for it. The main storyline setting up what's going on here, involving the family returning to their grandmother's house looking to clean it up and coming across a series of keys that unlock the dark forces haunting the house and unleashing them upon the group for their misdeeds in the past, serves well enough to allow for some intriguing elements here. Seeing the group going through the house, trying to get their past history settled and the exploits within the house, and the setup of the key discovery that unlocks the various houses inside offers the intriguing idea of the house coming to life and turning the siblings' past against them. These hauntings are remarkably vivid, well-detailed in their description, and come together nicely with a series of revelations and twists at the end that make everything come through with a clever enough twist for what's going on. It all makes this a lot to like and has some enjoyable factors.
There are some factors here that do pop up. The main element present in the story is the generally immediate means that everything starts happening as if there's no real build-up to any of the supernatural encounters. The repeated notion of someone coming into a new room in the house and immediately thrust into this series of supernatural flashbacks detailing the family's previous adventures while in the house and it just feels as though there's been nothing built up to that point. The events and descriptions provided just happen so quickly that it's usually hard to get a handle on everything as we're whipped around to various events and places in history which could've used a bit more length to flesh out and let them breathe. As well, it's also somewhat difficult to care about anyone other than the main girl Alexis who has some likable qualities as things go on but yet everyone else here becomes progressively less interesting as time goes on making their fates less impactful. It's pretty much the main feature holding it down.
3.5/5