 Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to another book review. Just to preface this right off the bat, this is not going to be positive in any way shape or form. I read Ezekiel Boone's The Mansion and I didn't like it whatsoever. I'm going to go through this and explain exactly what I didn't like. I will start off less spoilery and I will get more spoilery as we go on. As of right now, the book is out. It dropped December 4th. Atria Publishing. Let's see here. Yeah, Emily Bestler Books. Atria Publishing was nice enough to send me a copy. Sorry, but yeah, this isn't gonna go well. I have a bookmark in here for the exact place where I actively started to load this book, actively started to hate it. And that is at exactly page 200. I want you to imagine for a minute. This this book was pitched to me. The one of the representatives contacted me and asked me if I wanted to read kind of like a reboot of The Shining. I forget exactly how it was described to me, but I do know that The Shining was one of the words that caught me and I'm all for you people trapped in a location. So I thought I'd give it a try. There's been a recent resurgence of lesser authors trying to capitalize on greater works. One of those just throwing this out there. Hugely popular book. A Head Full of Ghosts is just a modern reboot of The Exorcist. I don't think it was done very well. Of course, I am in the vast minority there, so you guys might love this book. I will continue to talk about what I didn't like, but that's one of the things that first caught my attention very early on was the similarities between The Shining and this book and not in any good way. The setup here imagine The Shining. Imagine Stephen King's The Shining. Where the first half of the book. This is something like four to six hundred pages. I can't remember. It depends on which copy you get. The first, you know, half of The Shining, all that is is the prefatory, the stuff at the beginning. Imagine a book like that. Imagine if The Shining took half of the book for them to even get to the hotel. Now imagine a book where they actually get to the hotel in the first quarter and then they leave the hotel to go shopping for the next quarter of the book. And we're gonna get into more spoilers now. So if you are wanting to read this because I said it was like a head full of ghosts, it's not, but I hated these two books for completely different reasons. A Head Full of Ghosts was at least well written. This book is written with the structure of a literary novel where you spend a lot of time with the characters. You get a lot of character development. I mean we're told right off the bat that one character is an alcoholic and one character is hugely successful. And then you throw a woman in the middle, literally just tossed in. You have almost no character buildup for this lady. Just tossed in the mix. And then we're given a love triangle on par with, wait for it, Twilight. How I'm going to describe this before I get into the really big spoilers. Imagine if Michael Crichton and Stephanie Myers collaborated on a reboot of The Shining. Imagine that. You have these faux pseudoscience I don't even know what to call them. You have this technology side that's not written very well. It's not the fun side of science. It's the, you know, it's it's all the boring stuff, if I'm honest. And then you have on top of that you have a love triangle between this woman that, you know, hasn't been developed at all. Other than we know that she doesn't trust her alcoholic husband. Oh, yeah. Did I mention alcohol? I think I did mention, but alcoholic stuck in a resort hotel place that might be hunted. I there's actually twins in the book. I can't make this stuff up. There's twins in the book. I don't believe that there were twins in King's The Shining. I think Kubrick did that on his own accord, but there's twins. There might be a psychic element. There are whole sections of this book. I can't remember reading because I was dumbfounded at how boring it was. I have no idea if you guys at Atria are watching this and I hate that you made it this far, but why did you publish this? I don't understand that 200 pages and in the first hundred pages they do gets to the hotel and then he leaves to go on a shopping trip for another what, 70, 60 pages before they get back to the hotel? Who thought that was a good idea? I had a buddy of mine who couldn't even, I got this dude, Michael Hicks, finishes damn near everything. He's a reviewer. He's an author. He made it, I think he made it 15 pages, 15, no, so 15% before he started skimming and me and him got to talking and he goes, does it get any better? And I'm like, no, it's pretty much the whole book. And there is some action that picks up, I would say in the last 75%, so I guess the last 100 pages, there's some stuff that goes on. It gets kind of interesting, but not enough to, not nowhere near enough happens to even remotely come close to making this the first 300 pages forgivable. There's just, there's terrible, terrible stuff in here. The most action that happens in the first 200 pages, the most action that happens is somebody cuts their hand and there's a scene in a bathroom that lasts all of a page and a half. It's just, I don't, I don't know where it went wrong and I can only imagine that this book was published because they published his first three books, which was the hatching series. And he had another book, so they just signed the consent of contract. That's exactly what it feels like. It feels like one of those books to fill in a space while he works on something good. That's kind of what it feels like. Of course, I'm giving this a big fat one star. I didn't like anything about it. And it has been a long time, well, not actually, you know, that's a lie. Elevation was one star bad by Stephen King. This one, I don't even want to, you know, everybody, if you're still watching this video, watching me rant, everybody has that one book or maybe even several books where you wish you could give below one star. Some people say, oh, I wish I could give six, 10 stars to this book. I don't even want to give this book one star. It is so bad. If you go and check out the look inside on Amazon, I want you to imagine reading that for 200 pages before anything else happens. There is a massive, like 30, 40 page info dump. At the very beginning, that's how the book starts, is with a massive info dump. You find out all of these two guys's history, why they hate each other, everything. It's like Boone decided, I was like, okay, I have, I, he wrote down all the stuff that these two guys have been together and decided instead of sprinkling that throughout the book, he just dumped it all in the first chapter. Why? I don't get it. Anyways, I'm sure there's people out there that will love this book. I'm sure there are people out there who love this book, not to upset the publisher. I just, I don't, this is one of those ones, and I hate saying this. You guys know that I have a completely open mind when it comes to this stuff, but this is one of those books I don't see anybody enjoying. The book is out today. If you want to go check it out, please do. If you like Boone's stuff, please throw all your money at him. That's fine. This is my worst book of the year. You guys can wait for my best and worst of videos, but this is the worst book I've read this year. Also, final note, it took me three months to read this. I got to page 75. I stopped because I was bored. I got to page 200. I stopped because I was bored, and then I read several different books in between there, but then I finished it and one got off a weekend just because it was sent to me for review. Again, I'm sorry, but I got to be honest. This is one of those books that would be a reputation killer. If somebody came out and said, I love this book, I would stop watching their content. I would stop reading their reviews. There is nothing redeemable about this book. Anyways, so there you go. Until next time, I have been E, you have been U. This has been another book review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye. What the f-