ARC Review: There’s Someone Inside Your House

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Title: There’s Someone Inside Your House

Author: Stephanie Perkins

Series: N/A

Publisher: Macmillan Children’s Books

Release Date: October 5th 2017

Rating:

Over a year after her parents sent her away from Hawaii to live with her grandmother in landlocked Nebraska, Makani Young is still adjusting to her new life. She’s made a small group of close friends and even flirted with romance, but her past in Hawaii is still hard to forget. And then…one by one the students of her new high school begin to die in a series of gruesome murders. Makani doesn’t know who’s next on the list. Between this, and a secret scorching relationship with the school weirdo, this school year may turn out to be one to die for…literally.

There’s Someone Inside Your House by Stephanie Perkins will have you swooning with fear and romance, and is the perfect page-turner for fans of Scream Queens and I Know What You Did Last Summer.

– Blurb courtesy of goodreads.com

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

My Thoughts On…

…The Plot

“That was when her brain processed the noise. The noise that had woken her up.
Ticking.
Haley’s blood chilled. She rolled over to face the nightstand. Her phone was gone, and in its place, right at eye level, was the egg timer. It went off.”

When Haley Whitehall is murdered, found dead and mutilated in her own home, it’s all anyone can talk about the next day at Makani’s school. Well, that and Ollie Larsson’s newly dyed pink hair. Everyone is swapping stories about what they think happened, rumours that become more outlandish with every retelling, but it’s only when a second student is found dead, in the school this time, that people start to genuinely fear for their own lives.

It seems like the killer is targeting Osborne High students, crossing them off their list one by one. Makani has no idea who is next, but with the killer targeting students from different cliques no one is safe, and as more bodies are found the police remain at a loss. Students are terrified; they travel everywhere in groups, too scared to be alone for longer than a few minutes. They’re not safe at school, not even safe at home from this killer who is able to enter their homes and who is brutally killing without any obvious motive or reason.

“Overnight every student had become a potential target. The story went national. Three murders had give Osborne a serial killer. And not just any serial killer, but the media’s favourite kind—someone who committed heinous acts on attractive teenagers.”

I couldn’t recommend this book for anyone faint of heart. The kills in There’s Someone Inside Your House are incredibly gruesome at times and if I’d been reading this in my house I’m not sure I would have been able to continue reading it without someone else around for support. The way the killer could enter any house, any location that was supposed to be safe, and hunt down their victims was really chilling. No one and nowhere was safe and you got a real sense of that as the story continued.

Normally horror books, the horror genre in general, isn’t my thing, but I couldn’t get enough of There’s Someone Inside Your House. I came up with theory after theory as to who the killer could be but I wasn’t close, in fact it was embarrassing how far off the mark I realised I was when the killer was finally revealed. The only reason There’s Someone Inside Your House wasn’t a five star read for me was because I felt the ending felt a little too abrupt. It wrapped everything up, but I was surprised by where in the story it ended because it felt like there should have been a little more to close off the book and Makani’s story.

…The Characters

“But Makani’s banishment to Osborne wasn’t just because of her own unspeakable mistake. Grandma Young had also done something bad.”

Makani moved to Nebraska to stay with her grandmother as a form of exile. She is hiding a dark secret about her past which she is terrified of anyone discovering, and when the killings become more frequent she fears what it could mean for her if the police or her fellow students find out the real reason she left Hawaii. I thought Makani was an incredibly developed character, and as much as There’s Someone Inside Your House is a horror story it’s also a contemporary one as we follow Makani throughout.

Even before what happened in Hawaii forced her to move Makani wasn’t close to her parents. They’re more concerned with themselves and their upcoming divorce than they are their only child. As more and more of Makani’s fellow students are targeted, as the population of Osborne High lives in fear, her parents still can’t look past their own issues to feel even a little worried over their daughter’s safety. Makani’s relationship with her grandmother was a little closer, but in a way they’re both being punished; Makani having moved in to keep an eye on her grandmother whose sleepwalking episodes have been getting worse and worse.

“Darby and Alex never purposefully treated Makani like a charity case, but she was still the intruder on their decade-long best friendship.”

Despite having two close friends at school, Darby and Alex, Makani often feels a little left out, on the outside of their duo. Darby and Alex have been friends forever, the side effects of growing up in a small town where everyone knows everyone else from birth until death. There are a lot of inside jokes and discussions about the past that Makani is left out on, but more than that when the murders start increasing there are times when Alex and Darby reach for each other for support and comfort before they reach for Makani.

“For the first time, Makani realised that Ollie’s appearance and demeanour weren’t merely acts of rebellion. They were armour for his shyness.”

Ollie is the loner at Osborne High. There’s no one who really knows him and as such he becomes the subject of a lot of rumours; most are harmless rumours that come with high school, students filling in the blanks with whatever information they think they overheard, but as the murders continue the rumours become more sinister. During the summer Makani and Ollie had a relationship, but it fizzled when they returned to school thanks to miscommunication on both their parts. Makani has always liked Ollie, she sees something in him no one else seems to that makes her want to reach out for him, defend him when no one else does and stand up for him even to her best friends.

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It was that I’d seen this book compared to Scream that drew me to There’s Someone Inside Your House. I was hooked from the very first page, terrified for every character we were introduced to because I never knew what would happen next and who would be targeted next, but I had a lot of fun trying to guess where Stephanie Perkins would take the story.

There’s Someone Inside Your House was very different to Perkin’s Anna and the French Kiss, but the fact that I loved both just goes to show what a talented author she is that she can write attention-grabbing stories across a variety of genres.

What did you think of There’s Someone Inside Your House? Was it a favourite of yours or could you just not get into the story? Let me know.

All quotes have been taken from an ARC and may differ in the final publication.