The Dead House by Dawn Kurtagich

Summary:

The Dead House is a young adult novel that takes place at a boarding school. The novel focuses on one student named Carly Johnson. Carly has dissociative identity disorder (DID), formerly known as multiple personality disorder…. or does she?! The novel asks the question: what if everything is not as it seems? What if everyone thinks you’re crazy, but you’re actually two souls living in one body…two souls that eventually become possessed by a demon? But, I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Carly’s “case of DID” is interesting, because her alter, Kaitlyn, is only present during the night. Carly gets the day, and Kaitlyn gets the night. Of course, Carly’s parents are dead. The event causing their death has escaped her memory, and her psychiatrist (whose name escapes me now, and I just finished the book) believes her parent’s tragic death (murder?) triggered her DID. Something happens one night that disrupts the balance between Carly and Kaitlyn’s existence. Carly appears to be, well, gone. Kaitlyn can’t figure out what happened to Carly and is losing her mind trying to get her back. Some dark magic is unleashed and a lot of people die.

Review:

I was immediately drawn to this book, because it not only deals with mental illness, it also puts a paranormal twist on it. My favorite genre is fantasy, probably paranormal fantasy most of all. My favorite topic other than literature is psychology, so this was a match made in heaven for me, or at least that’s how it appeared at first blush.

My first problem with this novel was the juvenile writing style. It is true that the writing style in young adult novels is often a little more simplistic than adult fiction, largely because many teenagers get bored easily, so the authors hesitate to add too much detail or flowery writing. However, this was among the most simplistic writing that I have ever read, and I read middle grade fiction as well. The novel uses different media such as pictures or “video stills” and most notably, diary entries written by Kaitlyn as well as interview and video transcripts. The diary entries were just too juvenile for me. I understand that the author was trying to make the entries seem believably written by a teenager, and she did achieve that, but it pulled me out of the story. The simplistic writing did not fit with the really dark tone of the novel.

That’s the thing. Normally, I would recommend a novel with such a juvenile writing style to a younger age group, perhaps 13 to 15-year-olds. However, the violence depicted in the novel would prevent me from recommending this book to that age group whole-heartedly. There were also several YA tropes present, such as the ubiquitous boarding school, absent/dead parents, teen angst, and loneliness.  In the end, I thought the novel’s technique did not live up to its concept. I thought this was mediocre, and I only gave it a 3 out of 5 star rating on Goodreads.

Kurtagich recently released another novel, entitled The Creeper Man in the UK (where she’s from) or And The Trees Crept In for us here in the US. While I am hesitant, I do plan on picking up her second novel. There was, of course, a teaser at the end of The Dead House that intrigued me, and I was already intrigued after hearing a lot about And The Trees Crept In. Also, most of my issues stem from Kurtagich’s technique, so I’m excited to see if her technique has improved upon her second attempt.

Kurtagich, Dawn. The Dead House. N.p.: Little, Brown for Young Readers, 2015. Print.