Alone

Seda, sixteen, lives in a huge, creepy Victorian mansion that formerly served as a murder mystery resort.   Having been dragged there by her exuberant professor mother, and with no company except for her rambunctious (and much younger) siblings, Seda wants nothing more than to ditch the desolate hotel and return to her former life in Boston.  But Seda has problems that run much deeper than her current address, and these are brought to a fever pitch when a carful of college students is stranded at the motel during a snowstorm.

 

There’s plenty of suspense here, and the reader who enjoys plot twists and unreliable first-person narration will want to tune in.  But the real fun is in the setting – a scary run-down mansion on a lonely mountaintop, which sounds like a cliché but which the author brings to life with astonishing clarity.  You can almost feel the heavy velvet draperies, smell the mixture of dust and decaying woodwork, and hear the dripping bathroom fixture that sounds a bit too much like a human body bleeding out.

 

"Alone" is a gripping piece of teen horror with some excellent descriptive writing.