Review: This Cursed House

This Cursed House by Del Sandeen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thanks to Netgalley and Berkley for a pre-release copy of This Cursed House. Below is my honest review.

Now that was a fun debut novel! I'm a big fan of gothic horror, and This Cursed House delivered. Was it perfect? No. There were some places where the story felt like it was hitting the same beat a few times in repetition, and during the first few chapters, the repeated use of "hazel eye" descriptions pulled me out of the story a bit. But it was a great novel nonetheless. I wanted to know what was going on, and hung on to every word in hopes of figuring it out, craving just another supernatural moment.

This book also made me feel very uncomfortable, but in a good way. As a white person, it's sometimes easy to forget the historical systemic issues surrounding race, and how that celebration of whiteness and devaluation of blackness even affected how lighter-skinned Black people treated darker-skinned ones. While being set in the past, this novel did a great job of reminding us that while some things might have gotten better, we still have a long way to go in repairing the damage caused by racism and slavery.

All in all, a great read, and I look forward to Del Sandeen's next book! Definitely recommended for fans of Southern gothic horror (light horror, really).

View all my reviews