 Hi there, today on Typical Books I'm going to be talking about The Haunting of Gillespie House by Darcy Cotes. Now The Haunting of Gillespie House is a 2015 book by Darcy Cotes and it's very small. It's a self-published and I believe she still self-publishes but has registered as a publisher in her own right. I believe she does do a mix. She's a hybrid author, as far as I can tell, that does publish traditionally and self-publishing and with small houses, big houses. So yeah, kind of becoming a bit of a hero of mine as far as writing craft goes. Now this particular book is, as I said, very slim. So it was a nice quick easy read and I'll always use Merse from Heartbeats in the Trees term of a creepy cozy book because that's exactly what Darcy Cotes offers us. I've also used Merse scoring the bookscorer from her page. So if you're not already following Heartbeats in the Trees, definitely do so and thank you for coming up with that amazing spreadsheet. I'm a spreadsheet sucker and I guess I've just not been as determined to come up with something as perfect but I always do want to give some sort of out of five score or an out of 10 score would probably be a little more definitive but the scoring method of having it out of three gives certain aspects of a book. Like is it creepy enough? Yes, no, maybe. You know, yes, no, 50-50. That's sort of how I'm thinking of it. So it takes a lot of the thinking out of scoring a book because I just give everything five out of five if I read it in zero if I didn't bring like that's kind of bad but thank you again for devising that because this is one of the first ones I'm going to use that table and I'd like to use it going forward so that I can subscribe a star method. I also do other book reviews that are sometimes they don't make it on this channel but sometimes are ghost written as well and they often do ask for a star rating of some sort and I'm just not good at doing that. So anyway, Elle finds herself in a haunted house that is the stuff of dreams. This is a haunted house that has been modernized on one hand yet has all of the remnants of its former glory shoved up into the attic and that to me is just it's every little girl's haunted house dream right. Some houses breathe. Elle is thrilled to spend a month minding the beautiful Gillespie property more than an hour's drive from the nearest town and surrounded by forests the aging mansion is ideal for someone seeking solitude but things start to go very wrong very quickly. Elle discovers a crumbling graveyard nestled in the woods that contains a generation of a house's residents all with an identical year of death. Scratching up the walls, slamming doors, whispers in the night a locked room. As Elle explores deeper into the house she begins to unravel the property's dark and dangerous history. At its center is Jonathan Gillespie a tyrannical cult leader and the house's original owner and as Elle soon learns just because he's dead doesn't mean he's gone. Now this includes the short story Call Space on which this book was set. Now one thing I like is its length if I haven't said three times already but it couldn't have contained anything more. You know this story is an expanded version a very different version from the short story contained with this as well so it is a very different story but there isn't any more story to tell and I really do applaud an author. I mean you can write a Kleenex box-sized book if that's the story that is in you that needs to get out in its entirety. You can also write a 20,000 word novelette too short to be a novella too long to be a short story something like that if that's the story that needs to get out and that's where Huntington Gillespie house seems to sit is somewhere in that novella novelette sort of range. Now this reminded me a lot of Darling starring Lauren Ashley Carter if you dig this lone girl in a weird house of strange unexplainable things happening to her and maybe somewhat unreliable narrator sort of thing going on whether it's the house kind of driving her nuts or she comes with a little bit of a touched frame of mind or the house owners themselves or what. There's a little bit of that more so in Darling of course so if you like that lone girl in an unexpected haunted or somewhat haunted scenario I definitely seek that film out. Now this isn't really the top of the pile as far as Darcy Cote's books goes but I enjoyed it very very much. I had a lot of fun with this I like some of her newer stuff and of course that goes to say like when an author is is growing and maturing their older work is definitely getting better and better and better as it goes on. Like I said previously about Grady Hendricks if we sold our souls was not as good as Horror Store there'd be something the wrong way right so her more recent work is much better and there's more recent work that seems to be even more sinister than I want to get too soon. Now I enjoyed the atmosphere of this very much this old mansion in the woods and it not only reminded me of growing up on an old farmhouse myself with a lot of these sort of elements in the house it also reminded me of Lovecraft's work and not from the mythos angle because Lovecraft seems to be a very different type of writer to me than than he is to other people but this sort of growing claustrophobia this unreliable narrator that becomes birthed within somebody who at one point had been 100% reliable or came to us as somebody who we would judge as a person of sound mind and body and we even begin to doubt that as we go on through the book. Now this is a lot less purple and prose than somewhere like that it's not the most eloquently written book it's very utilitarian but it's not quite like YA or Goosebumps level writing it's just a lot more fun it clips along it's somewhat casual although not being trendy and I really like that balance that coats strikes in a lot of her work. So with the bookscorer this got 77 out of 114 which sounded dire at first but then looking at it that boils down to four out of five which is maybe a little higher than I would have suspected but it sounds about right to me it's not perfect by any means but it is super fun I had a great time with it it's a very light read and it did its job as far as entertaining me in that creepy cozy way haunted houses, graveyards, cults, history, time jumping all contained within a very short sit oh yeah I enjoyed it very much so if you've read anything that is really similar let me know if you're currently reading anything really similar or if you've read The Haunting of Gillespie House let me know in the comments below and make sure that you have an oaky spooky day The Haunting of Gillespie House by Darcy Coates it is a typical book