The Unseen (a parapsychology mystery) [Versión Kindle]

I've been wavering between three or four stars with The Unseen. I've read Alexandra Sokoloff's previous work. I thought The Harrowing was great and I absolutely loved The Price. But something about The Unseen made it not as captivating as the other two.

I love haunted house stories. Always have. There's just so much build up in them and most of the time, it delivers. That was one of my problems with The Unseen. Firstly, it took a long while for anything remotely creepy to happen. Usually I don't mind it since it sets the mood up earlier. But this didn't happen. While it took about a hundred pages for anything to get going, I felt that while the author was building up the characters, the mood just wasn't being set up. There was no eerie sense of foreboding in the first hundred pages.

But when things start to get going, they really got going. The last hundred pages were very intense, though, it wasn't exactly creepy nor scary. Just a bit thrilling. Another aspect that bothered me was that there were more questions than answers when I finished reading the book. I know that sometimes horror novels have to keep that sense of mystery, but this one just had way too many threads that went unexplored.

The premise was very intriguing, though. And while I wasn't particularly scared, I was interested enough to keep reading the book. It just fell a little bit flat to me. I would recommend her other books, The Harrowing and The Price, slightly more than this one.

This is dangerous territory for writers of the genre: paranormal psychological phenomena. Is ESP real and measurable? Can the wall between reality and the otherworldly be breached? Certainly, many have tried to transport from the living to the dead, most notable the Victorian penchant for séances and communications with the deceased, often fraudulent attempts to separate grieving family members from their money. Sokoloff knocks on that dark door again in this thriller, as two professors from Duke University try to recreate a 1965 experiment with such tragic consequences that all records have been sealed until recently. But now Professors Laurel MacDonald and Brendan Cody have undertaken to reassemble the critical participants of the original experiment, a mysterious study in ESP at Folger House, using two high-testing students as the other members of the quartet.

Professor MacDonald is new to the Duke faculty. She has come from California, a shattering emotional trauma leaving her vulnerable and rootless, transplanted to an unfamiliar place to begin anew. It is not surprising that Laurel joins forces with Brendan when the charming coworker helps her locate the mystery-shrouded Folger House where they will conduct the experiment. MacDonald and Cody live in a "publish or perish" environment, the subject of their study having broad appeal in a cynical world where such things as poltergeists remain a source of public curiosity. Folger House is intimidating, the four visitors an odd blend of skepticism and curiosity. Tyler Mountford is undoubtedly brilliant, but vaguely untrustworthy. Katrina de Vore clearly has a serious crush on Professor Cody, who slightly resembles the fiancé that Laurel left behind in California. Brendan is perhaps the most obviously invested in the success of the experiment.

The author has primed this pump for maximum unpredictability, her anxious characters thrust into a remote location that reeks of a menace and the past, of madness and mystery, of poltergeists and inexplicable occurrences. Modern technology may not be sufficient when dark forces rule and foolish humans call out to the unknown to manifest itself. Strange dreams, shifting perspectives, loud thumps and rock showers abound, as Cody and MacDonald find themselves just as unmoored as the screaming Katrina when the mirrors shatter in her room. While Laurel hovers between logic and fear, the house comes alive with malice. A denouement beckons, inviting, but I haven't quite made the leap of faith required by this thriller. Terror hovers at the edges of this tale, but never exactly reaches the threshold, lots of racket and banging, but just this side of truly memorable or believable. Luan Gaines/2009.

As a fan of ghost and haunted house stories I often have a hard time finding ones without gore. Since stories with hauntings or supernatural elements usually fall under the heading of "horror" and the words horror and gore seem to be synonymous in the literary world it sometimes happens that I buy a book that sounds like a book about ghosts and those who deal with them only to find myself knee-deep in attempts to gross me out with endless descriptions of just how much abuse and destruction a human body can be put through. When this happens I chuck the book in a rage of disgust and go back to reread Julian's House for the umpteenth time.
Now, you may be wondering why I'm telling you this since it has nothing to do with Alexandra Sokoloff's The Unseen. Well, as the old Grape Nuts slogan of the 1920s put it..."There's a reason"
The reason is that when, after reading the reviews and learning that this was a pretty pure haunted house novel with little to no gore I snapped it up eagerly, so excited to possibly add another favorite to my list...somehow it just didn't work out quite as planned.
While this WAS a ghost story with no gore I couldn't help but have the distinct feeling that the author either felt that writing romance was her real love, or that she was badgered by her publishers to "Add more sex. People BUY sex" and yeah, sure, they do...but with the internet they have the option of buying steamy romances or outright bow-chika-wow-wow hardcore so they DON'T need to buy ghost stories that seem more focused on describing the sexual tension and attraction of the characters than in getting into the spooky mystery.

For the first hundred pages at least, we were constantly treated to descriptions of the breathstopping attractions of hot/charming/irresistible Brendan Cody (seriously?) the professorial colleague with wild Irish charm and a mysterious secret. Shhhh!
This makes the heroine come off as an utter dolt whose main focus---oh and she's a professor of psychology, by the way, lord love us---is looking for sexual innuendo and romantic insinuations from every damned man she comes across in the book! From Tyler, a spoiled, charming student who always seems to make her blush (how old IS this chickie anyway?) to the aforementioned Brendan Cody, whose body heat distracts our horndog heroine every time she walks past the man/is in a room with him/thinks about him or sees him from a distance!

I mean REALLY. No interaction between these two can even occur without us being beaten over the head with the fact that the heroine is mad attracted to him and hearing about his "heat", and very few of her interactions with the psychic powerhouse of a student can occur without some sort of sexual interest or tension being mentioned.

And these people don't even GET to the haunted house until after the first hundred pages, after which we do have a few suspenseful moments courtesy the spook factor...but we also get two bouts of sex, more... oh so many more, references to Brendan's body heat as well as a few more opportunities to see Tyler's ability to make our adult heroine turn red and feel off center because of her response to his languid, feline charm---being Southern he is, of course, languidly charming in the extreme.

By the time the haunting started in earnest I was heartily sick of this "adult" professor who didn't have the womanly savvy to sit a jealous and resentful female student, called Katrina, down and spell out to her that this needless active hostility was a problem that could make it difficult to carry out an experiment that required living together in the same house for a month.
And since we're in a forgiving mood let us not be bothered by the fact that the whole Katrina hates Laurel subplot was confusing since the young girl's openly expressed resentment seemed based upon nothing other than the fact that Laurel was a female and a colleague of that old ladykiller Brendan.

The supernatural part, once it got going was disorienting and creepy, though hardly as unnerving as it should have been had the author spent less time reminding us that Brendan makes Laurel blush and tremble when Tyler isn't making her feel nervous and undressed and more time on the spooks.

Oh well (insert long sigh here) since gore-less ghost mysteries or supernatural thrillers aren't that easy to find I'll probably give Sokoloff's other books a try but for heaven's sake please, if your protagonists are supposed to be adults with advanced degrees in professions of responsibility, let them act like grownups rather than like hormone addled 15 year olds.
Sadly, for those reasons, I have to give this one 3 stars. Not the worst book I've ever read, but certainly not one I'd care to revisit.
For those who like supernatural suspense or Ghosts Without Gore I'd suggest Julian's House by Judith Hawkes, the Haunted Ballad Series by Deborah Grabien, or Barbara Erskine's Midnight is a Lonely Place or House of Shadows.
All these are books with protagonists in relationships but the relationship part isn't such a speedbump in the freeway of the spooky plot.