'Seventeen-year-old Lisa Jacobs is determined to solve her father's gruesome murder. But before she can investigate in her own small town, she is forced to spend the summer with her Uncle Clayton, the owner of Grand Hallow--a massive funeral and mortuary operation the size of a small city. Her move to Grand Hallow only deepens the mystery as she begins to suspect the strange and chilling occurrences there are linked to her father's death. With the help of her acid-tongued best friend and deadbeat brother, Lisa must unravel the secrets of Grand Hallow--before it's too late.'
I have to admit, I was initially drawn to this book by its cover. I liked hoe simple, yet pretty the design was, and how it seemed to be two pieces cut together. Plus, it used the word antemortem in the title; a word that's kind of pretty yet rarely used. It seems to be a word that's so often forgotten that my computer's spell checker is telling me it's not real.
Sadly, the cover and the title seemed to be the best thing about this book. Now I'm not saying it's a bad book, not at all. But it wasn't the book that I was expecting it to be. This is probably my fault, and I shouldn't place blame on anyone else for this, but I came away from the book at the end feeling a little flat.
It begins well enough, with the initial mystery of the murder of Lisa's father at his gas station. The scene in which Lisa finds him is quite creepy, and it's interesting how Stephen Stromp chooses to have her go somewhat numb in her reaction, rather than to become hysterical or upset as a lot of writers would. After a while, though, this numbness seems to translate into coldness. Lisa becomes obsessed with tracking down her father's killer and getting to the bottom of things that it wasn't until I reached the very end of the book that I realised that I don't remember Lisa crying about events even once.
I understand the desire to want a strong protagonist, one that wants to tackle the mystery presented here rather than to wallow in grief, but after a while it ends up with Lisa feeling a little emotionless. This is genuinely quite sad, as Lisa seemed to be a pretty good lead character otherwise. She has some good ideas for how to get to the bottom of things, and seems to have a level of maturity that most teenage girls wouldn't have.
After the initial chapters where Lisa loses her father and makes the decision to track down the killer herself, she gets shipped off to live with her uncle Clayton for the next few months until she reaches 18, at which point she will be an adult and can do what she wants. Lisa is sent to stay at Grand Hallow, a huge funeral home, with hundreds of acres of graveyard, and it's own mortuary and crematorium facilities. She essentially becomes one of only a handful of living people in a town of the dead.
Instead of this hampering her investigations it seems to lead to more mysteries, mysteries that include deranged morticians, cannibalism, and ghostly little girls.
I have to be honest, once Lisa travels to Grand Hallow things started to get a little stranger. The almost casual way that Lisa begins to interact with two creepy young girls that claim to live in the graveyard, girls that appear at her window in the middle of the night asking her to come play is a little infuriating. Did Lisa never watch a horror film? I honestly can't think of many people who'd causally go off into the graveyard at night to play with the children, but seem to just shrug away the fact that they turn out to be ghost. Or at least that's what she's led to think.
About half way through the book the story seems to get something of a resolution. The person who killed Lisa's father is found, and she gets to leave Grand Hallow. It's not until you realise there's still about half the book left, that there's been no explanation about the dead girls, and no reason given why Lisa can apparently read people's memories from drinking their blood (that happens very early in the book with almost no attention given to it), that you realise there's still a lot left to wrap up.
Unfortunately, this second half of the book seemed to go a little too crazy for me. The story shifted, a lot. New plot points and weird revelations kept being added that it felt like two very different stories got smashed together into one. Yes, there are hints at some of these things earlier on in the book, such as Lisa's blood memory abilities, but they're so quickly mentioned and glossed over then that it feels like a big shock when they become the least crazy thing happening in the final act. I'm not going to say too much about what happens towards the end so as not to spoil too much, but it'll be stuff that you're not expecting.
In The Graveyard Antemortem is a book that goes places you don't expect, and will definitely read better if you go into it suspending your disbelief. It's not especially realistic, people act weirdly and things that just wouldn't happen in real life happen here in order to service the plot. If you go into the book knowing this, you could probably have a good time with it. There's mystery, there's horror, and there's twists that will take you by surprise. An odd, yet entertaining YA novel.
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