The Haunted by Bentley Little
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Scare Factor: 💀💀💀
Plot: 📕📕📕📕
Format: 🎧
POV: Third Person

🕊️ ➞ Tropes:

🏚️👻Haunted House 👻🏚️
👻💀Paranormal💀👻
👹Demonic Forces👹
🏚️Amityville Vibes🏚️

✴✴✴ TW: Talk of suicide and murder ✴✴✴


🕊️ ➞ Progress Notes & Initial Thoughts:

This was a great refresh after a few dull murder reads. The hauntings were quite chilling in the beginning. The plot was a bit of a rollercoaster… It started good, progressed to weird, and then… bam! Underwhelming ending. Listened to it while doing my makeup and didn’t even bat an eye when the end credits came on.



I just wanna be left shocked, surprised, bamboozled, and hoodwinked. None of which occurred at the end of this book.




🕊️ ➞ Plot Breakdown & Commentary:

The Haunted took off with a married couple, Julian and Claire, who decided to move somewhere else as their neighborhood began to decline. They perused around until they settled on an older home and then began the process of moving their 14-year-old daughter, Megan, and 12-year-old son, James, into their new home.

Shortly after they arrived, each family member began to notice small but strange things happening around the home. A rotten smell permeated and leaked upstairs from the basement, doors that opened on their own, murmured voices, things moved around, and everyone had some kind of nightmare involving the home.

Julian was the first to experience a nightmare about the house as well as anything strange. He brushed it off as nothing. He also began hearing murmuring in Megan’s room while she was asleep as well as when she wasn’t home.

James was next. He also had nightmares about the basement as well as a man. A creepy man cast in shadow with an evil grin with teeth so white they almost glow. James began eating and craving the soil of a specific spot on the property. Cause random bouts of pika are normal… Love that for him…

Claire’s experiences began with things moving around the house, and hearing loud music playing, and both she and Julian experienced a wave of feral (?) lust. The scenes left me cringing and on the verge of vomiting.



New ick… referring to a woman’s as musky is a HUGE no from me.



The author wrote these s3x scenes like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Chaotic and reluctant. I’m not sure if the nature of the intimate relations and the atmosphere around it was intentional or not, but if you aimed to incite shock, physical cringing, and emotional scarring, you succeeded. I can never unsee those mental images. I scrunched my face up so much listening to this that my cheeks and nose ached.



Megan received strange text messages and visits to her room by the evil ghost man. She also watched one of her friends get molested by this spirit… It was weird.



Anyways, Claire and Julian learned that the owners before the previous ones had a homeless man break in and unalive himself in the basement. The more they dug into the house and land’s history, the more they learned about the evil occurrences that cursed their home’s soil.

During a housewarming party with their neighbors, Julian and Claire experienced a few strange things that night. Two were notable… Firstly, the entire party experienced a ghost apparition as the malevolent spirit walked through the living room. Most people fled while some remained frozen in shock. Three of the neighbors’ husbands stayed behind and spoke with the couple. One informed them that they weren’t crazy and expressed belief that what just happened was supernatural.

Secondly, earlier in the evening, one of the couples was caught in the basement, in that spooky smelly spot, and both were aggressively m-b-ing with a Barbie and a Christmas decoration. Separately. Standing next to each other.



I HATE THESE SCENES WTF



Also, I most definitely did NOT need the description of the wet Barbie doll head to be as explicit as it was. But, you know, thanks for that.





Things proceeded to worsen as the family’s fear began to heighten. When a familiar stranger unalived himself in their garage, the energy in the home began to shift. The entity began to grow stronger.

When it trashed the home, the family was driven out and Claire took the kids to stay with her parents. Julian chose to stay a little longer, both because of his allure to the house as well as his distaste for his father-in-law. During his time alone in the house, we learned who Miles was, a character mentioned ominously a few times.

Miles was Claire and Julian’s first son. He died when he was four when the family went hiking and the ground on the edge of a cliff crumbled beneath the little boy’s feet. Megan was born shortly after and the couple never spoke of Miles again. Not even to their other children; they locked up all the old photo albums and erased him.

Back at his in-laws, Claire’s father, Roger, started an argument with Julian in which he degraded and emasculated him for “being a man afraid of his own house.” Fed up, Julian challenged Roger to go to the house and see for himself. Being the toxic male that Roger was, he took Julian up on that challenge and went alone. He immediately regretted it, but it was too late. He went missing and by the time anyone realized where he went, Roger was gone and the house was immaculate.

Julian was able to learn that the entity was made of the spirits it took. At its core, it’s evil. It needed its victims to be willing. As it continued its attempts at luring the family back, Julian returned in hopes of exorcizing the entity. He felt the energy in the home and as he looked around he realized the house wouldn’t let him leave alive.

He came up with a plan to sacrifice himself as a way to stop the entity once and for all. Once the entity absorbed his spirit, he was able to gain control since he was the strongest, and stretched the power far and wide till it dissipated…? At least that’s what I understood of the ending. Sad and anti-climatic.



Before his spirit completely dissipated, he visited his family one last time. After feeling his presence, Claire and the kids knew what Julian had done. Claire sold the house and moved the kids back to California and didn’t return for six years.

Before leaving for college, eighteen-year-old James returned with his family to check out the house and get some closure. Not feeling any energy there, the family left and James anticipated his future as he reminisced about his father.



🐦‍⬛ ↳ House’s Background:

1598: On a mission, Miguel Huerta and his men set up camp for the night in an uninhibited valley. Their guide had initially refused to take them through the valley and only did so after violent persuasion. The legend of the land was that a great massacre had occurred in the valley and since then the land had felt evil. The natives shunned it and ignored the valley completely, refusing to build on the accursed land. During the night, Miguel and his crew were awakened by their horses’ horrible screams. All twenty horses had escaped their tethers and all ran in the same direction. When they found their steeds, they were still screaming… but they were also eating each other to death.

When the men were able to tie the horses down and apart, Miguel noticed a makeshift shelter and while it scared him, he entered it. Inside, the floor was made of human bones and a severed hand was cooking in the fire pit. He hightailed it out of there.



When he exited he saw that two of his best men began a duel to the death, trapped in a trance. The leader of the group was overcome with the need to stop the duel and murdered one of his men brutally.

1777: Father Juarez visited the land where a Christian church was supposed to be built. The local workers refused to set foot on that part of the land, let alone build on it. The priest ordered all the workers to be killed and pour the foundation over their bodies.



1855: Kit Carson, a scout and Native agent, was called to scope out a village that was believed to sit on cursed land. Disregarding the natives’ warning, he entered the ominous cabin. To Kit, only moments past when it was hours. He sensed evil and malice while he was in there, it chilled him. When he emerged he was overcome with anger when he noticed all the totems and figurines in the villagers’ windows. It’s probably for protection from evil, but hey go off with your ignorance and superiority. Unshockingly, he blamed them for bringing this evil by rejecting his people’s preachings and for continuing with “their pagan ways” and slaughtered the entire village. Men, women, and children.



I hate humans.

1921: Sheriff Luther Dunlop was investigating a domestic murder in which a whole castrated and gutted her husband. The weird part was that the husband displayed no defensive wounds or ligature marks… He just let his wife murder him. Spooky. Luther expressed dislike and fear regarding Rainey Street. Claimed that horrible things happened to every single house. However, one specific home emitted such evil that it infected the land around it. While he continued his investigation, another call came in about Rainy Street. A woman was h@nging her children on her front porch. When Luther and the police arrived, she had successfully ended two of her three children’s lives. When she was pulled away, she became feral and began to scream. The remaining child seemed to be in some type of trance as he did not fight his mother on what she was doing.



🕊️ ➞ Closing Thoughts:

I didn’t connect with any of the characters. The scary bits of the story were pretty good and chilling at times. The background on the house was even more chilling. I enjoyed the plot and the build-up, but I was disappointed greatly with the ending. I felt it to be lackluster after all this hype. I recommend it if you want a quick read to fill your time. That is if you can get over the god-awful s3x scenes.

If you’ve read The Haunted, leave a comment below and let me know what you think!

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