Sundial

I loved The Last House On Needless Street, so I had high hopes for this one. Unfortunately, it did not live up to my expectations at all. I was really enjoying this book for about the first 30% or so. The meat of the story - Rob, her abusive husband, and her two very weird daughters - was intriguing (I'm a sucker for an evil child storyline), and I continued enjoying that part of the story the rest of the way through. However that part of the story takes a massive backseat to large swathes of flashbacks interspersed with ... some kind of secondary creative writing project? Idk, it was weird and all over the place. It was trying to be a lot of things, and ended up being none of them. And the 'book within a book' didn't have any kind of relevance that I could find.I think the thing that threw me the most though was the rampant child/animal abuse that I was in no way prepared for. I'm not particularly precious, it's fine if books include this stuff (it literally happens in real life all the time), but a lot of it seemed placed for shock value and therefore ended up being both disturbing and underwhelming. Related to this, Irving was perhaps the most jarring character for me - none of his actions felt like they had motivation behind them beyond "this book needs another evil character." He was so one-dimensional he was barely a person at all. Like Edgar, the many-cockroaches-in-a-person-suit villain of Men in Black. It was like he was an alien who watched one movie about an abusive husband and then just ... started acting like that. That's the best I can do. I dunno, this was a weird one. I'll give her other book, Looking Glass Sound a shot because of how much I loved The Last House On Needless Street, but this was definitely a disappointment (particularly given how much I enjoyed the start).