‘No Doors. No Windows’ – Joe Schreiber (Del Rey)

According to my local supermarket it’s pretty much Christmas time already (you should see the stuff they are stocking) which means that, despite the fact that it’s still September, I’m already woefully behind with my Halloween reading! :o) I decided to take care of that straight away and first up is Joe Schreiber’s ‘No Doors, No Windows’ (due to be released in the next couple of weeks by Del Rey). Ever since I saw the cover art for Schreiber’s ‘Deathtroopers’ I’ve been looking forward to picking it up, not long to go now... ‘No Doors, No Windows’ seemed like a good book to tide me over in the meantime; sometimes the best way to find out about a forthcoming book is to read the author’s books that have preceded it.
I finished ‘No Doors, No Windows’ on the way into work this morning. I’m hoping for a little more from ‘Deathtroopers’ but the initial signs are that we could be in for a bit of a treat. ‘No Doors, No Windows’ is a scary read...

Scott Mast is back in his New England hometown helping clean out the family home after his father’s funeral; he doesn’t expect to be around for too long but events are about to conspire to keep him town for a lot longer than he thought. If he’s not careful, Scott will never leave...
An unfinished manuscript, of his father’s, leads Scott to the house the story was set in and a decision to finish the book that his father began. It’s not entirely Scott’s own decision though... There’s more to this house than meets the eye; dark parts of the Mast family history is tied up in the house’s secret passageways and so is the curse that is even now wrapping it’s fingers around Scott’s fragile mind... Will he be able to withstand it or will Scott be driven to the same acts of madness that have claimed the minds of generations of men in the Mast family?

I’m a bit of a sucker for ghost stories especially when I’m on my own in the house... Or am I? What was that noise I just heard..? A good ghost story wraps you up in its plot and smacks you with something so scary (that you never saw coming) that you just have to go and check all the doors to make sure that nothing else is in the house with you. ‘No Doors, No Windows’ does this very well but I was left thinking that there was room for a little more...

Schreiber weaves an impressive tale right from the start. The reader knows that there’s something a little odd right from the start and Schreiber doles out little snippets of information that keep the plot moving forward (and kept my interest) and point towards something ominous on the horizon. You don’t get the whole picture until right at the end but what Schreiber feeds us in the meantime is tantalising enough to keep us turning those pages. The setting is appropriately bleak as well, a New England town (why does all the scary stuff seem to happen in New England towns?) that’s brimming over with secrets that no-one wants to let out. If that wasn’t enough there’s a monster snow storm on the way and it’s just the kind of storm that’s apt to trap people just when they’re trying to get away from their worst nightmare...

I enjoyed Schreiber’s characterisation as well; love em’ or hate em’, all of the main players are well rounded out with enough secrets about them to make you want to find out more and see how these make them develop. Scott and Owen in particular are characters that I wanted to invest my time in and this involvement made the ‘scary bits’ even scarier when they jumped out of the page and grabbed me.

Schreiber writes some mean passages that made me shudder as well as, on one occasion, say ‘What the f...’ Don’t underestimate this man; Schreiber switches effortlessly from writing scenes that seem perfectly normal, until you realise just what has happened, to hitting his reader with the full horror of what lies within the Round House. He’s also not afraid to leave his reader hanging, at the end of a chapter, and this approach had me racing through the pages to find out what happened next.

What I found though is that for every time Schreiber got the timing just right he also had a habit of building up to climatic events a little too much. When this happened there was so much detail that the payoff came across as almost an afterthought and this really interrupted the flow of the plot. The abundance of detail didn’t leave a lot room for the ending either. Sometimes events are rushed, in real life, and there is an argument for having the book end in this way. I couldn’t help thinking though that a little more detail in the right place (instead of having to cram explanations in at the death) would have made all the difference.

While I had issues with the structure of ‘No Doors, No Windows’, the story itself is very entertaining and kept me reading throughout. I’m even more excited about reading ‘Deathtroopers’ (look out for the little mention in the book!) now...

Eight and a Half out of Ten