Wonderfully bizarre and ceaselessly creepy ... This is an exceptionally gloomy tale of anger and isolation, filled with strangeness, and delivered with sharp and fast prose.
Sophisticated ... Martinez breathes new life into the classic haunted house motif through her vivid exploration of generational trauma, violence, misogyny, and class.
If the book’s stubborn employment of unnamed characters seems confusing, it is. Martínez’s prose is fairly straightforward with a menacing snarl hiding amid all this subtext, but it often leaves one guessing as to what’s happening at all. There are interesting dynamics simmering underneath, not least the palpable sense of inherited trauma and the oppressive nature of inequality. However, the book’s metaphysical ambitions are compromised by structural flaws that threaten to leave readers adrift, if alarmed.
