Review: The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall
I don’t really know why, but I just went through this phase or a day or so when I shelved a number of Horror books to read them later (thanks Goodreads), and I decided to read one of them – the one which was readily available for free download.
So I actually hate horror movies and such so I was a bit apprehensive at first of reading this, but when I was partway through the book, I realized that there was no need for this apprehension. The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall by Katie Alender was pretty sad for a horror book. If I was to reevaluate the genre of this book, I probably put it under YA Fantasy or something.
Although I do hate horror, I’d want to read a book that actually scared me, like The Dead House by Dawn Kurtagich. Literally, my heart wasn’t even racing and I wasn’t wondering if the protagonist was going to survive because I didn’t actually care enough. There was a number of times where I was actually considering just not finishing it, but then I realized that I was practically almost finished and I might as well see it through.
This book was so boring. I mean, there was no action, there was no romance, there was nothing at all that would keep a reader interested. Even at the end of the book where there was supposed to be some action and suspense and stuff, it wasn’t really there. I wasn’t absorbed in the action as much as I would like to be, I just wasn’t feeling it. There was really no substance to the book at all, I could have read the beginning and the end and not missed anything at all.
Okay, so Delia, the protagonist, was supposed to be a heroine. But I just found her mostly annoying. She literally wasted about three years of her dead life sitting in one room, playing some damn music box over and over again. And it was all normal? It was like: “Oh hey, it’s been a while.” “Yeah, two years.” – what the hell?
And even after finishing the damn book, there was still the mystery of how Delia actually died? Which isn’t even a spoiler anyway because she dies at the beginning and the rest of the book is Delia trying to get back with her family and living the most boring ghost life I could’ve imagined.
And the namesake of the book? Pretty much just a title to suck people like me into reading a horrible horror story. So this ‘hysteria hall’ was not really a mental institution, but a place for female correction, or something. So pretty much it was just a place where you could send your kid or someone who you didn’t want around anymore, because the dead girls that inhabit this place, were really not as insane or evil as they were made out to be. It’s supposed to be a horror story, you can’t find the good in everyone.
