The Little Door Has The Best Stuff You Need For a Horror Novella
I had a nice Saturday surprise when I found The Little Door by Josh Radwell next on my to be read pile. It’s short and therefore unassuming but Radwell manages to fill 50 pages with a lot of some of the best stuff you can hope to find in a horror story.
It’s starts out like a haunted house story. It’s got some religious cult mixed in with small town creepiness and then finishes it all off with a pretty cool monster and page turning ending. You’d think having all of these type of elements in a novella would be too much to cram into that small amount of space, but you’d be wrong. Radwell manages to give each element the attention it deserves and is able to pull the tension out of each page to push you through the story.
With all the awesome elements mentioned above, you’d think one of them would be the best part of the novella, but you’d be wrong. For me, the part of the story that moves it from an okay story to a very good story is the narrator’s voice. It’s written in first person and the narrator is written in the absolute perfect tone for the story. The narrator, Henry, comes across as truthful and personable right from the start. The tone is very conversational. The story is broken up into sections of various length. Some of those sections are straight-up storytelling, while others involve the narrator talking to the reader, which doesn’t always work for me, but is very well done and fits the story in this case.
The story revolves around Henry who has just purchased a new house in a small town. He learns that there is a church nearby and worries that he will become subject to door-to-door proselytizing due to his proximity to the church. This becomes the least of his worries as he finds a small door hidden in his new house, when he asks the realtor about it she becomes very cryptic and Henry goes on to investigate what lies beyond the door on his own. When he finally gets the religious group showing up at his door, things are ripe to take a dark turn and the story does, but I will leave the end up for you to find out for yourself.
If there was a problem that I had with the story overall it’s that the background information given didn’t cover the topics I wanted to know more about. I’d love to know more about the history of the religious group and about how a town keeping such dark secrets was able to exist for so long without anyone from the outside becoming aware of what was going on there. Instead the back story was limited to Henry, with little revealed about the rest of the characters and groups in the story.
The Little Door is definitely worth the read and I encourage any fan of horror to pick this one up and give it a shot. It narrowly misses a 4 and comes in at a VERY STRONG 3/5.
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