I recently finished reading Landlocked Lighthouse, the recent thriller by Mixi J. Applebottom. Mixi and I have been friends for quite a while, so this one was pretty high on my reading list; when she was offering a free copy for signing up on her newsletter, just as I finished The Martian, it became a no-brainer.

One of my favorite types of horror is what I have described to my friends as “house horror”. As an introvert, my home is where I go to recharge and relax, as a result, stories about people feeling uncomfortable in their homes strikes a particular chord in me that really hits me (House of Leaves comes to mind, and if you remember that I also like epistolary, it was a double-whammy of amazingness). As a result, I love this kind of horror, and while I feel that Landlocked Lighthouse was more thriller and less horror, I still quite enjoyed it.

The thing that Mixi pulls off particularly well, is the introduction to the house. There’s the sense that there is something weird going on, but nothing that the protagonist nor the reader can really say is wrong. Here, it’s the odd childish claim, a picture that is just a little too accurate, or the missing box, while it’s explicitly not the gargoyles leering down into the foyer. The gargoyles get quite a lot of screen time, you get to study them from many angles, but that thing that Annabelle says? Nope, you only get to hear it once, and it’s gone.

Then there’s that point in the book where things go from weird to wrong, and the protagonist begins to take action against it. This is the point in the story where I struggled with Landlocked Lighthouse. For me, there was a very specific point in the book where it stopped being a mystery/horror and became an action/thriller – where I was still asking the question “why are these things happening” and the author was answering the question “how is the protagonist going to get out of this one?” I also had trouble relating to the protagonist – the events were a little too chaotic, and the protagonist a little too disorganized for me to really plug in.

This is not a problem with the writing per se, as much as it is a divergence of expectation. As a result, I ended up distancing myself from the story, sifting through the action to find out more clues about the house. While I certainly enjoyed this, at the end, I don’t feel like the mystery was resolved.