The Apartment by S.L. Grey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


For whatever reason, I didn’t write this review immediately after reading. Typically, I rush to compose my reviews while I am still in the heat of completion and experiencing an all-time high of whatever emotional response, positive or negative, the novel triggered. Sometimes I wonder if that flurry of emotions causes me to craft reviews that are largely critical and passive aggressive (so I have been told..), and had I placed some time and distance between the final page and my review, my opinion might be less hostile.

What I learned is while this might have worked with some novels that have crossed my path, it didn’t with this one. Quite the opposite occurred, actually. I simply forgot the majority of this book and now I don’t know where I stand. Did I like it? I gave it three stars immediately after reading (at least I did that!) so clearly I didn’t hate it. However, I can’t really assign any emotion to the storyline, good or bad. So instead, I will recall snippets that stood out to me, and sort them into categories. Join me, will you?

I distinctly remember the scene where the husband found buckets of human hair in the closet, and that was eerie and I love eerie, so I’ll put that in the “positives” column. I can also call to mind the scene where the husband was in a funhouse (??? nope, can’t remember if that’s where he actually was) and all kinds of weird halluncinary shit was happening, so we can assume that as a “positive” for me. Honestly, I don’t remember much about the wife or her experiences, beyond her maybe being somewhat irritating? Same with their child. So “negative”. I also remember being underwhelmed by the conclusion, so I guess I will align that in the “negative” category. But, I do feel the overall theme of the novel being how grief and guilt and resentment can literally eat away at your physical and mental being (and potentially make you susceptible to a haunted apartment that feeds on said grief, guilt and resentment) interesting, so I’ll add that to the “positive” column.

And at the rate I’m going lately, identifying that many positive attributes in a novel I only sort of remember the details of, is a big win.




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