The Place Where They Buried Your Heart, by Christina Henry

I know better. I really do. I swore off accepting books for review a couple of years ago. If you let them, they will inundate you with endless product, little of which is worthy of precious time or serious consideration.

I didn't hate Christina Henry's The House That Horror Built, but I didn't give it a positive review either. The setting was reasonably satisfying, but I felt the lead character was poorly drawn. Also, you aren't likely to win the hearts of horror people by depicting genre professionals in a bad light.

I felt Henry deserved another chance. The prospect of a free book was no enticement. I can get all I need or want from the public library. I relented, against my better judgement, and accepted a publicist's offer of a review copy of Christina Henry's The Place Where They Buried Your Heart. The cumbersome title already made me wary.

I wanted to like this novel, but there's very little for me to recommend about it.

First and foremost, the lead protagonist is even more unlikable than in The House Where Horror Lives. She is a typically snarky, temperamental modern individual. The kind people call a badass who doesn't take any shit from anyone. Even when she is in the wrong, which is often.

Jessie is a troubled girl as the novel begins, and understandably so. Her brother was eaten by a nearby house. Worse yet, she dared him to enter it. So I get that Jessie is a guilt-ridden, damaged person, but a little humor or any other sort of saving grace would be nice.

Jessie later has a baby and she pours her heart into raising him. The boy grows, but there is almost no personality in the character. I felt nothing and cared even less.

Jessie had a male admirer who saved her life from the clutches of the evil abode, but he's a cookie cutter bad boy. She tries to resist her attraction to him, but winds up deeply involved. She curses the boy throughout the book, complaining that he never changed his delinquent ways. Yet Jessie never gave him a break and never stopped discouraging him. I felt for the guy more than for her plight.

The house is the best part of The Place Where They Buried Your Heart, but without any emotional connection to the characters it was ineffectual.

This is Pop Horror. Like a fast food meal with little nutritional content, it went down the hatch and left my body with no benefit to my system.

The language is light and airy, even precious at times. This is almost Cozy Horror, despite a boy's arm being bitten off, a scene of self immolation, and other nasty moments. Violence is as mainstream as candy these days.

The Place Where They Buried My Heart is a perfect book for the average indiscriminate horror reader. Many will enjoy it and I'm sure a lot will admire or identify with Jessie. I'm definitely not the targeted demographic for this kind of horror novel.

Is it really any worse than the books I loved when I was starting out as a horror reader all those decades ago? No. No, it isn't. The difference is, those old, mostly dead writers laid the foundation for modern horror. They built the field with their innovations. Judging from the two books I've read from Christina Henry, she is merely riding on the coatheels of the genre, plodding along already-blazed trails.

Written by Mark Sieber