A Grave Way To Begin (Grave's End book review)

 

Grave's End: A True Ghost Story by Elaine Mercado

Despite being a short book, reading Grave’s End by Elaine Mercado felt like it lasted forever. I was hoping we’d get to action ¼ of the way through the book, or get to a climax by ½ way through (I read an e-book version and didn’t look at my progress very often). But every time I saw the chapter number was a disappointment. Not because the book was horrible, but because the book was boring.

The plot is a lot of the mom (and kids) being haunted by the paranormal, the mom repeating she wants to leave and is scared, her husband invalidating her, and then they cycle through those events again. She never leaves, just complains. She goes through phases of believing and doubting herself. I know this book is supposed to be based on a true story, so it makes sense that the plot is slow and long like it would be in real life. The author is the main character we follow, so it’s written like a autobiography. It makes sense she doesn’t leave her house because most people can’t just up and leave, especially with family. It follows the pattern of mental illness and questioning in how her mind is a broken record. But it was just so slow for a novel.

Then I finally hit the halfway point in the book. This is when everything changed from a story retelling to a novel. Finally we get a moving plot. Before the Halloween scene, the plot felt like it was stagnant, not moving forward. After her boss, lover, brother, and brother girlfriend validate her, the intensity of the ghosts pick up and with it so does the plot. We get increased ghost activity and the addiction of the ghost hunter and medium. There is finally a sense that everything is no longer a flat wishy-washy line of recurrence, that now there is a light at the end of the tunnel. This is when I started enjoying the story and reading it like a fiend. Before then, it was nice seeing a realistic interpretation of a ghost story told from both the kids as believers, the mom as questioning, and the dad in denial. But after the halfway point I finally felt like I could read the rest of the book in one sitting. But it says something if 80% of the way into thr book the official medium still isn't here.

The moving action makes the rest of this better. But, if I were to compare Grave’s End to other books I’ve read from earlier classes, it would not stand up. This book gets better the farther in you get, but as a whole it is not as entertaining for me as a book about Russian myths. Maybe ghost stories and haunting aren’t for me. This is certainly much better than ghosts sexually assaulting ladies, but that isn’t hard to accomplish. I suppose I’m just finding out that I enjoy books that move externally rather than analyze internally for the majority of the pages.

Overall: Could be worse, but could definitely be better.