Reading The Haunted is a bit like watching something decent to get you through until the next massive drop on Netflix, and that’s okay.
Danielle Vega, according to the marketing materials for her latest book, is “YA’s answer to Stephen King.” I can confidently say that she’s not the answer to Stephen King, not in the least because she doesn’t write thousand-page tomes that are still somehow compelling. (Looking at you, IT.) Thematically, The Haunted does owe something to King — the past having an impact on the present, malignant forces from beyond, and so on, but it’s not like it’s the kind of book that will haunt you enough to make millions at the box office.
(That’s another IT joke.)
Our protagonist is the teenager Hendricks, who is leaving a relationship behind, only to find that her new house in Drearford has issues of its own, namely some very vengeful spirits. Perhaps it’s that I’ve read too many of these, but it feels like Vega spools out what Hendricks is fleeing from for far too long in a book that barely cracks 250 pages. Are the details still horrifying? Yes, and it’s also a character moment for Hendricks to even be able to talk about it. Still, it just doesn’t feel right for it to drop when it does.
Beyond that, though, Hendricks seems pretty constantly torn between vestiges of her old, popular life and resurrecting it in Drearford, or the weird boy who’s semi-next-door who’s tied to her haunted house. It’s not that she’s hard to root for, but she doesn’t feel like a wholly-rounded character.
One supposes that that doesn’t necessarily matter in horror, but then you come back to the whole Stephen King comparison. Look at Carrie, for example — we understand her, we feel her struggles, and then we feel like the jerks at her school deserve everything we get. Hendricks’ friends all just feel flat for the most part, so though we know we should be feeling something for them and for her, it’s harder to get to that point.
Instead, it just feels like a transitional book, something you watch in between your Netflix binge-watches or your binge-reads. These kinds of books are necessary too.
All the same, The Haunted does bring some decent atmospheric scares for a quick read, and not every YA book needs to be mindblowing and amazing and fantastic. Certainly publishers would like it if they were, or if they all sold extremely well, but alas, neither of those is a guarantee. It’s just that when a book is hyped this way, one starts to wonder if you’re seeing what everyone else is.