Review: The Family Bones by Kimberly Raiser

Description:
A New Home, A Loving Family, A Dark Secret
 
Will they stay? Will they survive? The Weavers have inherited family property in Astral, Pennsylvania, a town so small that Mrs. Weaver can find no mention of it on the Internet, save for a tiny spot on Google Earth. Hoping for a simpler, small-town existence for their young family, Steven and Tara eagerly head to Astral to see what they hope will be their dream house. As they explore their potential new home, the Weavers begin to discover secret passageways, secret rooms, and long buried family truths; some difficult truths are revealed and no longer kept in the far reaches of the closet. There are reasons for everything, and sometimes the explanations are so simple. But sometimes, simple can also be horrifying.
 
Details:
ebook, 190 pages
Published (first published October 22nd 2008)
 
Review:
I LOVE me some dark family history, a little bit of horror, and a whole lot of mystery.  I found The Family Bones as a free download on Goodreads.  Was intrigued.  Read it (obviously).  Still not quite sure how I feel about it.  The description of this book was WAY off, and the cover--completely irrelevant to the story.
 
It starts off as a great horror movie would.  Strange house, scary basement, creepy attic.  But, slowly spirals to a sci-fi thriller.  I would have liked it better if it would have stayed horrific.  Not that I can’t appreciate the sci-fi genre, it just felt that The Family Bones was too much in the middle to be either genre.  It lacked theme.
 
Raiser’s plot is good.  The action is adequate.  The writing style is disjointed, hard to follow most of the time, and did I mention hard to follow?  She used a lot of words, I mean there were WAY too many, and the writing was bland.  There coulda/shoulda been much more color.  I was expecting a short, quick, scare-my-socks-off kind of read.  What I got was a book (I guess it’s a book, and not a short story) that was difficult to read, I got easily distracted from, and had to force myself to finish.
 
I don’t want to give too much away, but Sara is my hero!  Love her!  Steven gets what he deserves.  And all live happily ever after.  Well, we have to assume they do since there is really NO ENDING!  It just stops.  Hmmm, FINALLY run out of words, Ms. Raiser?
 
1 Star: Leave it in the dusty box in the creepy basement.
 
Many Adventures,
Richard