I couldn't fully get into this book. Perhaps it was a case of wrong book at the wrong time -- I may come back to it but for now it's a DNF.

An atmospheric, high-tec haunted house thriller, think The Shining's Overlook Hotel run by Amazon's Alexa.

I am a huge fan of the authors 'The Hatching' series and while this new book doesn't quite hit the same high note it is still a very original and enjoyable read.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Hatching trilogy, so I eagerly anticipated this read. However, while I still liked the book, I didn't LOVE it. I expected more of the story to be about the mansion and Nellie, but it was more a backdrop to a deeper character drama. While I clearly love and appreciate character development...if you're touting a book as a horror story, I expect at
Least a half and half story. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to someone looking for straight horror, but I wouldn't NOT recommend it to someone looking for a drama with horror elements.

Having devoured Ezekiel Boone's Hatching trilogy, I was eager to get my hands on this. Even before I knew what it was about, I just knew I needed it. Obviously, once I read the synopsis I was even more excited for it. The premise was interesting, a haunted mansion coupled with an incredibly advanced computer program/A.I? It sounded amazing but unfortunately, it wasn't quite what I expected. A majority of the book focuses on the messy lives of the characters rather than the creepy technology and honestly, that's what I was most interested in reading. Boone excels at developing his characters and building the backstory but I almost want to say he's a little too good at it. I feel like 70% of this book was going over Shawn's family history at Eagle Mansion and not enough time was spent exploring Nellie's integration into the mansion itself.

Overall, The Mansion was an enjoyable read. It was a bit repetitive in regards to Billy/Shawn/Emily's pasts but after Billy's first visit to the remodeled mansion...I was hooked. I loved the way Nellie would interact with them. It was creepy yet entertaining when she'd make a...dark or not so nice comment then when asked to repeat herself, she'd say something completely normal. Messing with their minds while they're already going stir crazy cooped up in the mansion - especially for Emily.
Side note - the entire time I was reading this, in the back of my mind all I could think of was The Shining and that old Disney movie Smart House...which really makes me want to re-read and re-watch those!

Many thanks to NetGalley, Atria/Emily Bestler Books, and Ezekiel Boone for the opportunity to read his latest thriller. As a fan of this Hatching series, I really liked this one too!

Billy and Shawn were university friends when they holed up for 2 years in an abandoned cottage on the property of Shawn's relatives with the crumbling mansion, supposedly haunted, hulking over them. They came up with what became Eagle Logic and were working on an even bigger project - an AI/personal assistant they called Nellie - when their personal and work relationship came to a grounding halt. Billy left with Shawn's girlfriend, Emily, and slowly started a downward spiral of drugs and alcohol. Shawn, meanwhile, turned Eagle Logic into a multi-billion dollar venture. As Billy's status becomes dire, Shawn approaches him with the opportunity of a lifetime - to help fix Nellie and become rich again in the process. What could go wrong?

Stay tuned - this is a fun/creepy ride all the way to the end. You'll never look at your Alexa/Google Home device the same way again!

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

And, sigh, an honest review is what they're going to get. I'm sad it's not going to be super positive. I sincerely adored Boone's Hatching trilogy. Seriously, I obsessed over it when it was coming out. I had to wait for book three for so long and read it the instant it came out. It had action. It had character development (even the red-shirts felt fleshed out before they got, well, red-shirted). It had plot. It had pace. It had fun.

Unfortunately, this one was a bust. It had so much potential - a horror story for a new age, a haunted house retelling in a world of crazy technology. And it did a lot of things well - for example, Nellie was pretty terrifying overall. The little glimpses of bad we saw really teased of things to come.

My gripe was this - the book was mostly boring. It took over half the book before they got to the Mansion. The real action didn't even start until like 80%. There was a lot of character development - Boone excels at this aspect - but the pacing was bad, and it needed more action and more actual buildup. There were hints of Nellie's bad, but they were just tiny hints, and they were similar ones over and over. And the supernatural twist didn't make much sense given the rest of the book, and lots of things were thrown in to make it seem like it would fit. For instance, there's one scene where Emily looks out the window and sees a woman in the distance. Nellie tells her it's not a woman. Emily looks again, and the woman is gone. We never are told the point of this - was there a woman and Nellie was lying? Was there no woman and Emily was seeing things? Did it even matter? Not really.

I enjoyed the characters and the rich development of the backstory. Unfortunately, that's all the book really ended up having done well. I know Ezekiel Boone is capable of much more, based off his prior trilogy. Here's hoping this was a fluke and the next one he puts out is back to his original quality. Let's be honest though, I'm still going to read whatever he puts out next. The Hatching trilogy made me a fan.

Ezekiel Boone has an amazing ability to turn mundane every day objects or beings into something truly terrifying. Something that once read, you can never unread or un-picture again. Once you have that terrifying thought of the what if in your mind, it's so very hard to ever see them the same again.

From spiders to houses, he can make them all not only seem horrific but truly like something you can imagine happening in our world and that might the most terrifying part of it all.

The Mansion is dark and atmospheric with rich detail that you almost have to wade through and put together slowly as you realize what is about to happen and yet, you know it's going to happen and you hope, as you feverishly turn the pages, that you are wrong and this won't be anything but a tale about a creepy old house and hidden secrets and ghosts.

Instead you get something chilly in it's realistic appeal and you can picture it all. A truly haunting story that is so much more than a ghost story and so much more than a story about revenge and lost loves and a past everyone wants kept hidden.

I received an ARC from Netgalley #netgalley for an honest review of this book. This is a great book. I can see it being made into a movie. Shawn and Billy fought over a girl, Emily. Billy won but Shawn is a billionaire and still has a spot in his heart for Emily. He and Billy made a computer assistant, Nellie, to care for your every need. Billy just needs to get it running and get the bugs out. He and Emily go back to where it all began, Whiskey Run. Unfortunately, Nellie doesn’t like competition.

A recovering alcoholic in a marriage on the rocks is offered a job to oversee a former hotel, now just a mansion, notorious for its macabre past. Sound familiar? Stop me if you've heard this one, then - there's a gifted child, in this case twins, with supernatural abilities thanks to being born with a caul.

I've read this book before, and it was a hell of a lot better the first time around. In The Mansion, Ezekiel Boone wages a full-frontal assault against reader's interests, bogging down the first four chapters with an entire series worth of character backstory's, plodding details, and unnecessary descriptions, all of which are told, and retold, and told again in a nearly infinite loop of heedless repetition. If you didn't get that Billy was an alcoholic the first time it's mentioned, don't worry - Boone will tell you over and over and over and over and over, usually within the same paragraph. Ditto that Billy and Shawn Eagle are no longer best buds and computer programming bros. Or that Eagle Mansion is utterly notorious. Everything you're told within the first couple pages are repeated for dozens more, and then a few dozen more just for good measure. Everything is repeated unnecessarily to the Nth degree.

Everything.

Every. Thing.

Ev.

Ery.

Th.

Ing.

Reading through the first ten percent of The Mansions, I was appalled at how overly padded it already felt. Where was the content editor for this thing? Was there even a content editor? So much of the first five chapters could have been readily condensed into half the page count just by expunging all the repetition. It's not until Chapter 5 that a semi-interesting development happens, and Boone lays out his intent. He's retelling The Shining with some technological updates. Unfortunately, he's also going about it in the most boring way possible by fixating on one or two details and telling you all about them over and over again. Every single character that gets introduced, no matter how ancillary, is given a full and immediate halt-everything, kill all momentum backstory. Billy and Emily are on the ousts? Interesting? Maybe. But wouldn't you rather hear about who Emily had Thanksgiving dinner with back in her college days years ago when she was rooming with a girl who's father was an oil baron and whose aunt did some such thing or another? Don't you want to know about literally every single college Emily applied to and was rejected from? No? Well, OK, fine. What about her gay co-worker, Andy? Boone has a lot to tell us about the kind of car Andy drives, why he drives it, and the state of his love life. Bored of that already? Well, let's head into chapter three where you can learn some more about how Billy is an alcoholic that hates Shawn. Hey, did you know Billy is an alcoholic that hates Shawn? Because he is. Silly Billy's a drinker, has a bit of a problem, you see. He also doesn't like Shawn too much, no siree. Do you get it? Let's start over! Billy is an alcoholic who hates Shawn...

It's fucking sad when the chapter headings like "In Which Emily Wiggins Takes a Nap" and "Aunt Emily Is Sad" are more interesting than the shit that happens in said chapter. It's fucking sad when 10% into the book I'm already skimming over entire sections, bored to tears and reduced to hate-reading as I mentally debate if I plug along and see if things pick up or if I should just quit this goddamned book already.

Well, I quit it. This one's a DNF at 14%. Since I didn't finish this, I will not post a rating on Goodreads or review on Amazon.

[Note: I received an advance reading copy of this title from the publisher, Atria/Emily Bestler Books, via NetGalley.]

The Mansion by Ezekiel Boone is a horror story that brings the idea of a haunting into this century and the digital age. After reading one might think twice before ever asking Siri or Alexa for any more favors in their lives.

Straight out of school Shawn Eagle and Billy Stafford spent a year locked away in a remote cabin writing the coding that would one day change the world, Eagle Logic. However, instead of both of them basking in the glory when the business booms Shawn got the company and Billy walked away with Emily who had dated Shawn first.

Now, years later, Shawn is a billionaire and Billy is a recovering alcoholic deep in debt so when Shawn approaches Billy to help him with his new AI software Billy can’t help but be interested. The deal is for Billy and Emily to move into the Mansion and fix Nellie but clearing their debt may cost them more than they bargained for.

The Mansion was my first try for a horror novel from Ezekiel Boone and I have to say I was a little torn walking away from this one. The idea of the plot was solid and I did find the writing enjoyable however there just didn’t seem to be enough of the horror. An extremely long time is spent building the back story and characters making things progress slowly so it felt as if the actual “haunting” was buried and rushed to a conclusion so in the end I would rate this at 3.5 stars.

I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.

The blurb definitely had me wanting to read this book and I did enjoy it. Echoes of The Shining and 2001 show throughout the story.

Two former friends, Shawn and Billy, fell out many years before, largely over a girl, Emily. One has gone on to become a technology billionaire, while the other is a recovering alcoholic in huge amounts of debt but still with Emily. When Shawn resurrects a project that he an Billy started in their youth, he is forced to contact Billy to get him to fix flaws in the system that despite his own expertise and that if his staff, he is unable to solve. The project is the ultimate personal assistant, Nellie, that surpasses anything that Alexa and other present-day systems could ever hope to achieve but when connected to a renovated mansion house, things don't quite go according to plan.

Unfortunately, the story takes a while getting to the point of the mansion with what felt an over-long introductory backstory. I persevered and enjoyed the story of Nellie and the mansion once I got there.

There are two twin girls in the story, Billy and Emily's nieces, and although likeable characters but they add an unnecessary odd element to the story, particularly during the closing chapters. It would have been nice to see them in their own separate story since their abilities jar a little with the technological elements of the story.

Overall an enjoyable read.

If you feel like you can't live without Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google... you probably don't want to read this book. I've used Alexa a few times, but I can live without.

Which I will absolutely do after reading this book, live without a virtual 'assistant' who can answer any question I have and remind me of obscure, easily forgettable things.

*brb going to make sure Alexa is disabled on my Kindle Fire*

I hope Ezekiel Boone won't mind me describing The Mansion as something that gives me strong vibes of Stephen King's The Shining, because it does. It's not the same book, not by any means. The similarities lie deep in Boone's Eagle Mansion and King's The Overlook Hotel, both hotels from bygone eras that carry a lot of baggage and have a personality, a soul of their own. It's winter in Boone's book too, and the caretakers are Billy and Emily Stafford.

But they aren't there to make sure the pipes don't freeze and the roof doesn't cave in under the weight of an upstate New York snow.

This is a twenty-first century book, and they are there because, a dozen years ago, Billy and his friend Shawn Eagle stayed on the Eagle family estate to code. It's originally a bit hazy why their partnership, one seemingly destined to create something like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft combined, ends up shattered but, perhaps not surprisingly, it's over a girl. Emily, to be precise.

Shawn has become richer than basically anyone ever, running a tech empire that seems to make Mark Zuckerberg jealous. But there's one thing he doesn't have... something he and Billy (and another friend named Takata but you have to read the book if you want to know what happened to him!) created as recent grads, something he can't work into the phones that bear his name.

Nellie.

She is why you might be wary of Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and... does the Google one have a name?

*brb going to turn off the Google one on my laptop, and the predictive search for good measure*

Billy becomes caretaker of Eagle Mansion that winter because there are ghosts and bugs and viruses in Nellie, and Shawn is running Nellie in the mansion, with the aim of creating what I imagine would be the ultimate 'smart' house to be scattered across America. But Billy had a drinking problem and slightly less alarming cocaine problem, and this creates just the right level of uncertainty as he prepares to tackle a problem that could make him him a multi-millionaire and Shawn a multi-multi-billionaire (because Shawn is kind of an awful person, not entirely without cause).

Nellie will freak you out. Shawn will make you... feel things. Billy will make you root for him. Ruth and Rose (twins and of one soul) will make you curious. And Emily will make you understand.

Horror and thrillers aren't usually my go-to genres (and to be fair, I've seen The Shining but I have not read it) but this is as good as it gets. It's a book that you will not be able to put down once you start it. and when that ever more irritating Real Life creeps in and makes you put it down? You'll be thinking about this book.

The Mansion is on sale December 4, 2018 wherever books are sold. Probably. Go buy it!

(I received a copy of The Mansion from NetGalley and Atria Books in exchange for an honest and original review. All thoughts are my own.)

I was not a fan of this one. Way too bro-y and too many extraneous plotlines and focus on a love triangle instead of horror.

A slow burning story which builds to an explosive finale! The characters were very well developed with interesting histories. I especially liked the how Nellie was a character in her own right. The idea that Nellie could control so much was fascinating and caused me to wonder if homes will be like that in the future. An excellent read and I look forward to reading many more titles by this author!

I absolutely adored Ezekiel Boone's 'The Hatching' trilogy, which is incredible given how I'm terrified of spiders, but that series was perfectly written with well-developed characters, fast-paced action, stunning twists and TONS of death and mayhem. I knew going into The Mansion that this wasn't going to be on a similarly apocalyptic scale of disaster, but I hoped the same magic would be at work here and that just wasn't the case.

All credit to the author - his careful work at establishing and building up the characters is obvious, this story is very much character-driven as opposed to being filled with action. The unfortunate part for me was that I really disliked both male leads for a fair amount of time - Shawn is an arrogant entitled jerk who does some truly appalling things to further his agenda, and Billy is so focused on that chip on his shoulder that he ruins his life and Emily's with his selfishness, terrible decision-making and addiction. I feel like we're meant to sympathize with Billy for being hard done by, but he does NOTHING to help himself and actively makes everything worse, it was actually tough reading from his perspective because he was so delusional about being a victim when he had a lot of sins to answer for. I wanted to root for Emily, but she was too busy being the bone these men fought over to have much for me to latch onto. 

There's nothing wrong with having unsympathetic protagonists, but I would've liked a decent amount of action to counterbalance that - seeing them struggle in the face of horror would've gone a long way to making the first half of the book less of a tedious slog. Instead, we're treated to countless flashbacks to the guys cohabiting in the shack when they first tried to bring their futuristic computer program to life and a tiresome love triangle once Emily arrives on the scene that does nobody any favors. I thought the first couple lines of the blurb merely set the scene, but in actuality, the book delves into that scenario in great and unnecessary detail.

I requested this ARC because of the amazing premise of a killer artificial intelligence that controls their living quarters - how creepy is that! You hear all these stories of #Alexafails where Alexa devices record private conversations and send them to the home-owner's contacts or orders random items on their credit card that were never requested, and as our society becomes more and more reliant on technology with it being incorporated into every facet of our daily lives, I could definitely see this 'smart home' idea taking off. The potential for it to go horribly wrong is an enticing concept and I was so excited to see how it would be tackled here - but I didn't expect that Nellie would barely exist except as a futile goal in flashbacks for basically half the novel!

Nellie deserved to dominate the story in all her insidious malevolent glory, but instead the main focus was on the messy human entanglements. She was allowed to let loose towards the end of the story, but that was too little, too late. The blurb mentions that Billy is brought back into the fold because her glitches are out of control and result in multiple deaths, but we don't see THOSE, so all we have to go on is Nellie whispering ominous threats and then pretending she said something else. Which honestly was pretty amusing in a passive-aggressive way, but I was expecting something more overtly malicious and deadly to come into play, and that wasn't the case til very nearly the end. 

I found the plot interesting enough that I finished reading this because I had to know how it was resolved, but I do feel like the blurb is misleading and should be rewritten to reflect the actual story - it's not so much a horror as a family drama, and it excels in that aspect with the dense backstory and complicated characterization, but people who pick this up expecting to be entertained by a chilling horror story as advertised might not find it satisfying in that regard.

3.25 out of 5.00 stars
Thank you, NetGalley, for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This was a fantastic book. A lot of nods to The Shining.

Billy and Emily have been together for about a dozen years, when Billy walked away from a partnership with Shawn on a program they were sure was going to change the world. At the time, Billy was certain that Emily, who had been Shawn's girlfriend, was worth whatever would come from the program. Shawn, in fact, bought Billy's share with $100k.

But it is now 12 years later, and Shawn is Shawn Eagle, billionaire tech guru owner of Eagle Technology, a company light years ahead of anything Google or Apple had when Eagle first came out. Billy is working on his 23rd month sober from alcohol and cocaine. He and Emily are probably only weeks from bankruptcy.

The first part of the book starts out unique enough. Shawn and Billy moved into a cabin on the property where Shawn grew up with a meek mother and a very drunk, very mean father. There's skeletons. Many skeletons. The build up of one of those skeletons is massive, however the actual end point of that build-up is somewhat mild.

Now, I'm going to try not give anything away, but let's do a run-down of the nods to The Shining:
1. Billy is a drunk. He's deluding himself that he's been off the wagon for 23 months because every time we turn a page, it's just one drink.
2. There's some twins with a talent akin to the shining.
3. Shawn's father actually tells him to come take his medicine.
4. Emily tells Billy and Shawn to figure the problem out before it goes redrum.
5. It's a hotel. Okay, so it's supposed to be a resort, but really, it's a hotel.
6. Billy is a down-on-his-luck guy who needs a break, and behold! a break as NOT a caretaker. Actually, the author was very specific about this, because Shawn tells Billy that he would not be a caretaker. He is there to find the ghost in the machine.
7. They get snowed in.

Billy accepts the kind-of olive branch from Shawn in accepting the role of finding what is wrong with Nellie - a program that was written all those years ago in that cabin, but that they had abandoned in pursuit of Eagle Technology. Shawn magically makes all of Billy's debt disappear. He puts money in his bank, with a promise that every three months for the duration of the project, even if it fails, he'll get that same amount again.

But if he succeeds? Oh, if Billy succeeds.

But is this a setup by Shawn? Is it an attempt to try to get Emily back after all these years? You'll have to read it to find out. Don't let my comparisons to The Shining put you off, it's a great book.

I did, however, feel like the ending was not only abrupt, but somewhat unbelievable. The author tried to tie up the loose ends, I just can't believe that even if no one found out, that everyone else involved was okay with everything that had happened, and just went on their merry way.

All in all, I liked the book. I definitely want to check out more of Boone's stuff. It wasn't over-the-top horror, and there's a lot of backstory and points where you're wondering if what one character or another is experiencing is real or hallucinated.

I also felt that the author did a really, really good representation of the struggle that Billy was enduring as he was battling his personal demons: drugs and alcohol. He was brutally accurate when he wrote about Billy "just having one" here and there, and that it "didn't count as falling off the wagon." That was so believable it hurt.

This started out so slowly and it was difficult to finish. I think the length of the book could be improved. It was too long which made it seem like it dragged in places. I would have liked more about the AI of the house and some scariness. There is so much potential here had the editing been a little more. The concept is excellent, just needs a little tighter execution. This feels like a good movie adaptation.

Totally in love with the creepy mansion and Nellie. Billy and Shawn might hate each other, but even they know that they have to work together to solve this mystery.
I know now why Ezekiel Boone was such a hit, his is an engaging author with a flair of creep factor. I flipped page to page, ignoring the clock and my beauty sleep. Of course I should not have read it before bed, because being a suspense thriller, I was awake until much later. Those who love a good mystery and trying to figure out stories, try reading this!

This started off OK. The two key characters of Billy and Shawn were well described and their complex history, interesting. I also really liked the idea of Nellie, the AI who controls the Mansion and who I really liked as a character. However, you don't meet Nellie until 25% into the book and there's just not enough of her / it!

Too many flashbacks and not a solid enough storyline to keep me hooked.

I'd definitely read another book by this author as there is something in the writing, but, it's currently too well hidden.

2*

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the opportunity to preview this book in exchange for my honest review.

I really enjoyed this book! Stick with it; I found the beginning to be a little slow, but it definitely picks up and peaks your interest. I love the premise of the book with the idea of technology taking over; it's totally relatable in today's world. An enjoyable, creepy Halloween read! Thanks, NetGalley!