Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I rarely actively dislike a book so severely I wonder why I am still reading it. Part of the fault here is mine, as I was expecting some form of ghost story or haunted house novel. This is no such thing, unless you grant a few tacked on pages at the end with being the main narrative drive of the story. Instead, this is a long, rambling history of a highly dysfunctional family. The writer shows sufficient mastery of language to draw me along for some time, but the abyssmal sense of plot and pace are dreadful. A couple of times during the book, I actually thought "I guess she felt she'd taken that as far as it will go, so this is going to be a different story now..." There is no payoff lurking at the end, no redemptive twist or upshot for having made it through. There is no clever tying up of the visions...no, all you get is a few things introduced after they've taken place - not mentioned when they happened, only mentioned later when needed to explain some plot point or other. This is one of those narratives about a life so bad that death is a release. It doesn't get better. Thankfully, it does eventually run out of pages.