I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I picked up this book. What I got was an inventive, intriguing and all-round solid horror book. The Forever House tells the story of the 'Eldreds', a group of aptly-named eldritch beings who like to disguise themselves as humans and feed off the pain of others. They are just moving into a neighbourhood where a horrific massacre took place and they're getting ready to mess with their latest victims.
The pacing of this book is pretty solid. You get chapters written in third person but focusing on each of the different people living in the neighbourhood, and this is done extremely well as there are many characters but it didn't become exhausting. The people themselves are a fairly mixed bunch. You have Neal and Kandice, a married couple who are struggling due to Kandice revealing she is bi. There is Cora, Martin and their daughter Vivienne, a family dealing with the pressure of Martin's gambling addiction. Perhaps the hardest character to read about is Spencer, a man struggling with his pedophilic urges and attraction to Vivienne. There are more characters than this but I considered these the main ones.
So yes, one of the main characters of this book is a pedophile and honestly, his sections get very graphic. I want to commend Waggoner for tackling this topic and actually pulling it off pretty well. Spencer is sympathetic in a way that might make some readers uncomfortable but his desires are never condoned. Having said that, the child character is described in an extremely graphic and sexual way throughout his chapters and this was very tough to stomach. I suspect a lot of people won't enjoy the book because of this and I think that is a valid reason to avoid picking it up.
Even without the sexualisation of children, the rest of this book has a large focus on sex. It felt a bit gratuitous a lot of the time and I honestly feel it didn't need to be there. Horror suffers a lot from unnecessary sex scenes and sexual assault (looking at you Stephen King) so it was a shame to see that at play here. At one point, a sex scene should have a fairly large emotional fallout but this is simply never discussed or dealt with by the narrative, a choice which is odd given the fantastic characterisation the rest of the time.
Sexual content aside, everything else about this book was spot on. I've already mentioned the characters but the way the horror was manifested into the story was done very creatively and I honestly had no idea how it would turn out. I would definitely recommend this to fans of eldritch-type horror who can stomach the graphic content and like a slightly light-hearted tone to their narration.
Overall Rating:
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