The Mansion

by Ezekiel Boone | Horror |
ISBN: 9781501165511 Global Overview for this book
Registered by wingGoryDetailswing of Nashua, New Hampshire USA on 8/4/2021
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2 journalers for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by wingGoryDetailswing from Nashua, New Hampshire USA on Wednesday, August 4, 2021
I got this softcover at Barnes and Noble. It's by the author of Skitter, which I enjoyed - but here, instead of a globe-spanning tale of rapidly-evolving and very deadly spiders, this book focuses on two men who developed a technological marvel - and then broke up over a woman, leaving one an alcoholic failure and the other a multi-billionaire. And then the rich man contacts his former friend and colleague to offer him a very juicy and lucrative job: debugging the near-sentient "personal assistant" that's meant to smoothly run its owner's house - and life...

There are some good elements here, but I admit I found it sorely in need of editing. From the beginning, where we first meet Billy (the alcoholic), the author falls into a pattern of repeating dialogue, emotions, and back-story multiple times; presumably this is to emphasize the significance, or in this case Billy's own mania, but it's not fun to read. After about page 5 of how badly Billy wanted to smash in the face of his former friend and potential benefactor, I was rolling my eyes and muttering "I think we get it already! Can we move on?"

Allowing for all the skimming I did to get past these repetitious bits, there's a pretty good suspense tale here, though it seems to borrow a LOT from King's The Shining - possibly an intentional homage/parody, though that wasn't clear. There's an alcoholic protagonist whose marriage is in trouble, the huge mansion in a remote location where it's bound to be snowed in for months at a time, the creepy twins (here, they're the Good Guys, if still a bit creepy, with touches of Danny's "shine"), even the history of depravity and crime in the building's history.

The differences? Well, the premise here has to do with the "not limited to 1's and 0's" software that is NOT an AI but is very, very close to one. Called "Nellie" in-story, it's supposedly a much more effective and efficient personal assistant, able to exceed such things as self-driving cars (already an accepted technology in widespread use in-story, so Slightly In The Future?) and Alexa/Siri/etc. (The way the author describes the technology is... weird, with those irksome repetitions about how it isn't "just 1's and 0's but something in between" and lots of talk about tangled layers of code that rewrites itself except for where it doesn't - I got the impression it was meant to sound tech-ish without having to actually be realistic. Some of the scenes in which Billy deep-ends on debugging did sound authentic, from my own software development past, but other than that it was a bit off. And also unnecessary - again, needed an editor.)

Anyway, Billy's task is to move into the completely-rebuilt mansion that rich-guy's grandfather originally built as a Gilded Age hotel-of-depravity, where Nellie has been installed as the controlling force. At first Nellie seems to be doing well, fulfilling everyone's needs smoothly, and actually being a friend to Billy's wife - but there have been glitches with deadly consequences during construction, and once everyone has moved in things begin to get worse. We learn more about Billy's relationship with Shawn (the Rich Guy), and how Emily chose Billy over Shawn way back in their college-dropout days. And we find that all of the major characters grew up in dysfunctional homes, so the pattern of abusive and/or neglectful parents plays out as well. (In Shawn's case there's an even darker backstory, which could have made him more sympathetic if he wasn't such an obsessive asshole.) Not that most of the other characters are much more likable... I think Emily's sister and her family (loving husband, creepy-but-cool twins) are the most sympathetic characters, but they're mainly observers most of the time.

I'm grousing quite a bit here, and it's true that these things irked me, but I did keep on reading. I wanted to find out what happened to Billy and Shawn's original colleague - clearly something bad, but the details don't come out 'til late in the story. And I wanted to know the truth about their respective backgrounds, and just how badly Billy's been falling off of the wagon, and whether Nellie really is a rogue AI or some buggy software or a kind of evil spirit haunting the site of so much pain and death... As to whether the main characters got out alive, well, I didn't care as much about that; as it was I found the ending a bit underwhelming, with one character who didn't deserve it getting a really nasty death while the survivors, some of whom did NOT deserve that, made out like bandits.

So - very much a mixed bag here, for me. Some very creepy scenes indeed, some intriguing possibilities re the various relationships - but, in the execution, way too heavy-handed, repetitive, and uneven.

Journal Entry 2 by wingGoryDetailswing at Nashua, New Hampshire USA on Monday, January 17, 2022

Released 2 yrs ago (1/18/2022 UTC) at Nashua, New Hampshire USA

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

I'm sending this to BCer T02S03B11D20 to fill a wish, for the US/Canada wishlist-tag game. Enjoy!

Journal Entry 3 by wingT02S03B11D20wing at Springport, Michigan USA on Tuesday, January 25, 2022
Thanks, this book showed up today. Your view of it made it sound interesting, but as I am leaving soon on a vacation, I think I will save it for when I get back and can concentrate on it better.

Journal Entry 4 by wingT02S03B11D20wing at Springport, Michigan USA on Saturday, April 16, 2022
I enjoyed reading this book. However, I have to admit that I felt it was an updated version of The Shining throughout most of the book. As has been noted...it has the isolated mansion, the drunk, the bad weather and twins, although in this case good twins. The evil history through family deeds, of course. The AI, (or something else, as they keep telling us) is slightly different. That is more like HAL in Space Odessey. The computer that wants more, needs more, controls more.
Still, I gave it a 4 star rating, bascially because it sucked me in and kept me reading.

Journal Entry 5 by wingT02S03B11D20wing at Upper Chichester, Pennsylvania USA on Saturday, April 16, 2022

Released 1 yr ago (4/20/2022 UTC) at Upper Chichester, Pennsylvania USA

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

Going to a fellow paperback swapper.

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