Book Review: The House of Secrets

Children's fantasy, by Chris Columbus and Ned Vizzini.

I must have picked this up a while ago in a bookshop, though I don't remember exactly when. It's a children's portal fantasy adventure novel involving magical books, and I mean, who doesn't like that? I'll say upfront that I am not the target audience, but I have read lots of childrens' fantasy in my time and have no quibbles with it in general.

We got off to a bad start when I pulled it off the shelf and spotted it was blurbed by That Woman. I tried not to let that prejudice me unduly.

In summary: Kids move to a creepy house, magic happens and they're isekai'd to deal with monsters and hazards brought right out of books - specific books they have available. There's a plot here about an evil tome of temptation which they could give to an evil witch to get home, if they just act selfishly enough for it to manifest. I like me some evil tomes, as regular readers may recall. From here they roll from peril to peril, eventually escaping.

So it's an okay children's adventure book, a genre where it isn't reasonable to expect wildly original plots or extreme subtlety. Still, I'd have liked some of one of those. "You are thrown into an actual book" isn't new, menaced by evil pirates isn't new, and an evil witch trying to force-tempt you into using the malevolent evil artefact on her behalf isn't new. Three siblings of various ages is pretty standard too, and the authors do a poor job at differentiating them except during their own dedicated scenes. The boy likes computer games and desperately wants a gun (well, he's American), the older girl wants to be seen as mature and is a Keen Reader, the younger girl wants to be taken seriously and is childish, innocent, yet wise enough to save the day at crucial moments. Unfortunately none of them has a particularly distinctive voice, and they tend to blur together during the story. It often felt like any of the three could have taken any particular action. The older girl gets fixated on a fictional fighter pilot they encounter, despite all the weirdness and tragedy they're caught up in, but also has occasional major tantrums that feel completely out of character. After spying for quite some time on a gang of extremely obviously dangerous armed bandits, the eight-year-old suddenly rushes to physically attack them because one of them talks about eating his horse.

Okay, characterisation is extremely thin for a book clocking in at over 500 pages - then again, there's a lot of adventure to cram in. So much, in fact, that they have no time for much reflection, even when they get a vision of their home with indication their parents are dead. There's a brief scene of sadness but we're quickly back to the next big action scene. We leap from mundanity to witch to banishment to evil raiders to giant to pirates to witch again to weird supervillain battle in a conveyor belt of action sequences with no breathing space. Nothing has any time to sink in, and none of the people they encounter have enough time to feel like more than flimsy sketches. In fairness, the premise of "three books mashed together" and magic makes me willing to accept the implausible way these all link together. Similarly, they're in a book world, so some things working on book logic does make sense. A stronger writer would have perhaps made it more obvious what was working on *diagetic* book-logic, what was working on book-logic we're meant to accept within the genre, and what was meant to be convincing.

Given the theme of temptation to bad impulses, it's a bit hard to tell in places whether characters are doing unwise things because they're human, because they're teenagers with poor impulse control, because of the Evil Book's influence, or if the writing's just unconvincing. Do we really stop to eat the obviously enchanted evil food that little sister is warning us explicitly not to eat, while we are supposedly trying to rescue our two friends from being tortured to death? Do we give a grenade to the tween in case he happens to need a grenade? At least the bit where kiddo randomly wanders off to detonate that grenade we can explicitly ascribe to the Evil Book.

It's cinematic, to the point that at times I felt scenes weren't really working when written down, but would on-screen. I see other reviewers have pointed out that Columbus is a director and that makes sense - I suspect they are fishing for a film adaptation. Similarly, the lack of characterisation and internal depth makes sense for a film where internal depth is very hard and where it's easy to depict a lot of action quickly. Even the length of the story fits that well: in general, the character development, dialogue, internality, and background detail that are quick to depict in writing take a lot of time to show on screen, whereas the detailed action that is quick to show on screen take a lot of page count to write down. If you took an average-length fantasy action film and wrote it all down in detail, you'd get something like this book.

I haven't read a book for this age group in a while, and I do remember there being lots of menace and fairly detailed threats even in decades-old books, so "I'm going to cut off and eat your fingers" isn't too out there, nor is the room made from human bones or the references to torture. However, there's an explicit description of an eye being ripped out (and several mentions of eye-violence), and I was surprised by the actual on-page murders. There's one line that vaguely felt like a hint at sexual violence, but on rereading I think it's meant to be more generic menace but at the girls specifically. So I don't think it's more violent than other books of the genre, but it did feel more gory and more explicit. Maybe I'm just out of touch. However, other reviewers touched on the gore element and violence too.

There isn't a great deal of the kids using cleverness or solving problems themselves, as they're largely rushed from problem to problem. They have a few clever ideas in the moment, but mostly survive by chance, never having any proactive ideas or planning anything. I don't think that would appeal much to me as a younger reader.

The ending of the book is a bit weird, in that it turns out the solution to all their problems is simply to use the evil book of evil to bring them safely home and restore their parents from the dead. I might have missed something, but it was specifically stated that the original Evil(?) Guy got horribly disfigured from overusing the evil book - our heroes have no such downsides. It does make sense that they might resort to it given the desperate situation. However, we've basically gone through this sequence:

1. Witch wants us to use the evil book! We should try to find it, maybe!
2. The book is obviously very evil! But maybe we should still do it as we have no other options!
3. No, it's even more evil than that!
4. Don't let her have it!
5. Even her evil dad is trying to stop her getting at the evil book!
6. OK we used the evil book to fix everything with no discernable downsides lol.

I can't help but notice also that while wishing for things to be restored, they bring back from the "dead" the entirely fictional boy that Girl A had a crush on, but don't bring back the actual living woman who had been murdered twice, first by original Evil Guy for discovering his secret, and then again inside the book where she'd somehow ended up as a corpse and then been brought back to life by [handwavy], just like the other skeletons who are also brought back to life by [handwavy]. I mean, it's a children's book, but that feels like one heck of an oversight.

Definitely not one where I'm going to investigate the series, or indeed hang onto this one. I hoped there might be something I could mine from this for gaming, but no, I don't think so. Wouldn't recommend it to any of the children I know either. If they're desperate for reading material and it's in the library, and they aren't particularly squeamish? Sure, why not.