The World House [Kindle Edition]

Well ok this might not be an all time classic and didn't 'blow me away' either but 'Yabba Dabba do!' Besides being blown away surely cannot be the desirable experience people make out and this was a great little book!

For me the flaws of the book were for the first 130 pages it was very fragmented. More a series of unpleasent events than a story. Also the humour, particularly the dialogue and the understated reaction of the characters to the events around them was slightley out of kilter with the at times quite shocking and upsetting deaths.

But! stick with the first 130 pages afterwich it all drops into place and go in with your eyes open knowing this isn't as fluffy and cuddley Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, though I would say does at the very least tip them a wink.

The story
Somewhere suspended away from usual time and space excists a house. A house where there is a bathroom with a bath big enough to spend weeks at sea in, broom cupboards where you may never return from, tribes of cannibals and so much more.

The house is linked to our world through a strange magical box which has the ability to transport the holder usually unwillingly into this surreal world. I say this but it is a world I was somehow familiar with. My own imagination and cheese dreams have taken me there myself though thankfully only briefly!

There were some clever ideas and characters if not exactly multi-faceted complex beings, were believable and consistant. Sophie the young autistic girl was as good as a written character portrayal of that condition as I have read since the 'The curious incident of the dog in the night'.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's about as escapist as you can get without boarding a space craft and whilst many of the ideas have been done before I have never seen them put together like this. It has shocks, laughs, excitement and rattles along like a steam train!
Cracking stuff. There is to be a follow up book and I will be buying it!

The premise of The World House, along with my lust to find a mind-blowing debut novelist to get behind, made ordering this book an easy decision (the glowing reviews didn't hurt none either), so I was expecting good things from Mr Adams.

The plot did not disappoint. The paradox motif is a well trodden path, but one that still interests, and Adams serves it up with great imagination and craftsmanship. What at first appears to be an organically grown pathway soon reveals itself to be a carefully constructed labyrinth, weaved through a bizarre and other-worldly house with the Prisoner the prize at its centre. But with all this going for it, The World House falls a long way short of that mind-blowing debut.

I expected the quality of the writing to be a given considering Adams' CV, but failed in the most basic areas: The narrative viewpoint is clumsy and inconsistent, floating between many different modes and shifting from page to page. The multi-character narrative is a strict discipline and demands a deft touch; Adams' grasp of it is amateurish at best, and is probably the catalyst for the novel's biggest flaw: the characters.

There are a couple of howling clichés occupying the House (Carruthers, the pith-helmet-wearing explorer most notably conforming to type), but it's the rest of the ensemble cast that will leave you wondering why you ever followed such a dull bunch around for 413 pages. There is not a sympathetic character among them, and that's not to say they are unlikeable, just dreary and monotonous. Samey. Take away their different clothes, eras and accents, there is nothing to characterise any of them, through speech or action. Every character is witty (a default setting it seems for Adams' dialogue), and accepts their teleportation into another dimension as if it were an everyday occurrence. Every deadly supernatural/alien encounter thereafter is met with more wit and an incredulous apathy. Even the Prisoner, by far the most one-dimensional and underwhelming of them all, speaks with the same wit and flippancy as everyone else.

It's the lack of depth and credibility in the characters' emotions and thought processes that set the tone of the novel, turning something that could have been dark and delicious into something cartoon-like. With no fears, goals or plausible motivations for the cast, the anticlimactic ending is understandably rushed, and plays out like a comedy, and I found myself indifferent to the outcome, no matter how clever. A bloody shame.

The World House could have been superb, but Adams has failed to inject any tension or atmosphere into his story via his characters: if a woman sees a group of mammoth woodlice emerge from the dark and has absolutely no reaction, why should I? Even Shaggy and Scooby had the good sense to be scared, and their monsters were just old guys in costumes.

A fun YA novel but a disappointing adult fantasy.

Ps. Does anyone know what happened to Carruthers' rifle?

I enjoyed this book immensely. I just couldn't put it down. It never led me where I was expecting to go,which I loved. It is full of great people that I quickly grow to care about. It's funny, scary, and delightful. The author has a great ear for dialogue which brings the characters effortlessly to life. Even though the things that happen to them are out of our world it never feels over done as they are so believable as people. Its a place with such nightmarish qualities that if I could read and hide behind a cushion at the same time I would have! It's full of surprises, twists, turns,laugter, sadness and a pace that left me breathless at times. I read until I couldn't keep my eyes open and them carried on as soon as I woke up in the morning. It's a read as quick as you can book, not one you'd want to have as a chapter a night before sleep.

I have given it to my 16 year old son to read and he is loving it as much as I did.