"It was all the monster stories he had ever heard come to life; it was all the fears he'd ever had; it was his worst nightmares, his most horrible imaginings."

As a life-long fan of the Halloween season and all things spooky, I'm always happy when I find a story drenched in it -- none of that 'it was set on Halloween, but that's just a vaguely outlined backdrop' nonsense.

'The Manse' is a Halloween novel as much as it's a haunted house story, and author Lisa Cantrell really leaned hard into both.

In the story, a local adult youth group have established a tradition of putting together and hosting a haunted house attraction at an old mansion owned by two elderly sisters who have begrudgingly leased it to them as a means of ensuring its survival and upkeep.

Already, this is a great set-up because in a story you can make a haunted house attraction as cool as you want it to be, unlike in real life, where it would be way too expensive to pull off. And her descriptions of the various scenarios the youth group put together are definitely really cool, and part of the fun of the reading experience was the feeling of wanting very badly to visit the attraction myself. Because Cantrell well and truly let her imagination go wild, dreaming up far more abstract and weirdly creepy set-ups for rooms at a haunted house than your typical 'everything's a bit dark and actors in masks slam doors and jump out yelling 'boo!''

But, of course, this is not just a Halloween story about a haunted house attraction: this house really is haunted... or alive... we're never really let in on the answer, and to be honest, it doesn't really matter.

I'm not generally a huge fan of 'haunted house' horror, especially because in movies this usually amounts to windows and floorboards rattling, shapes flitting across the screen, culminating in physical anthropomorphic figures attacking people, or possessing people -- you know.

But in 'The Manse' Cantrell again employs her imagination to instead come up with some truly singular means for the house itself to be the monster that kills unwitting haunted-house-goers or other trespassers. The darkness is a major antagonist in the story, and it has this uncanny ability to morph into something that exists in a state between a solid and a liquid. It moves like a vine, reaching out tendrils of shadow to capture its victim, drag them into itself, and destroy them.

Fire, mist, cobwebs, and any other material it can co-opt function similarly, and yet with their own little diabolical twists.

Towards the climax, we veer to the edge of the almost Lovecraftian.

There's background intrigue of just who the twins are who own the house, the identity of a mysterious woman who hangs around sometimes, and just what it is that makes this house tick.

Right before the climax things get a tad exposition-y when it comes to the question of the sisters, and that could have used some editing down, we never really find out what the deal with the woman skulking around is other than a tenuous connection to the story of the sisters. And we also never really know what the deal with the house is: is it evil because a string of murders was committed there, or was it evil before that and somehow caused the murders?

I'm not the type to need the magic explained, but I feel like Cantrell picked secret option number three by giving enough information that it feels like it should lead up to an explanation, but then not giving the answer -- and not in the fun 'open ending' kind of way, but more so in the 'let's wrap this up quickly' kind of way.

It's not the kind of book that's inviting you to think too hard, and if you do, none of it will make sense, so best not. Much like going to a haunted house attraction in real life, part of the fun is the chaos, and the chaos was rather glorious.

I was also pretty impressed by how well she was able to juggle a fairly large cast of characters. They were all fleshed out well enough that it was easy to remember everyone, the interpersonal conflicts were believable and felt interconnected even without tying back to the house itself other than them all working there. There were no stand-outs, but everyone was serviceable, and the love triangle drama didn't take up too much space.

There was a weird bit towards the beginning when Cantrell was trying to establish that one of the main characters is Black that was…uncomfortable. He's trying to comfort a kid that got really spooked at the haunted house, but the kid is afraid of him because his skin is dark (???) and the kid mistakes him for a monster (???) and then she also uses the phrase 'he shot her a homeboy smile' more than once. So there was a bit of cringe there, but then she luckily decided to just let him be a person and stopped doing that.

All in all, I really like 'The Manse' for what it is: Halloween horror schlock for everyone who likes the spooky season. I picked it up for the cover and I got what I was after.