Book Review: House of Idyll by Delilah S. Dawson
Genre: Horror Thriller
Age: Adult
Format: ebook
This wasn’t the worst horror I’ve read (this year), but it’s not great, and is, in fact, pretty damn messy. Angelina is a singer/songwriter who works as a barista. She gets a strange visit and ends up at a commune headed up by her favourite musician, Jesper Idyll. And you spend the next chunk of the book yelling, “Girl, it’s a cult”, before it shifts to outright “okay what is actually wrong with you”. There’s little to this, and it feels more built on aesthetics than any actual thought. If I was to describe this book in one word, it would be thoughtless.
Also, it felt like it would be a MCR (or other emo band) fanfic written by a teen in the early noughties, not to disparage those kind of fics (as I may or may not have been the kind of teen writing them), but the book as a whole just feels…meandering. Again, thoughtless.
Angelina is incredibly self-centred. At one point, she mentions how when everything is provided, there’s no need for community. I seriously can’t think of a more privileged take, despite the fact Anglina is supposed to be a struggling singer/songwriter. Or, Anglina, you’re not a very community minded person in the first place? Because everyone else seems to get along relatively well from what we see, despite us being told about the ‘tensions’ in the place.
There are so many holes in this! It’s not clear if Black Idyll are still around as a band or not, there’s some suggestion towards the beginning they kind of disappeared, but then we see them actively doing vaguely band related things. We never see Angelina ‘perform’, she just complains about how hard it is to make it. Jesper was apparently 16 when the band made it big, which doesn’t quite track for a more alt music style (pop differs). Women associated with the band keep dying and no one cares, but this is never reckoned with – I don’t care what kind of demon or devil or vague godlike deals are made, if this happens there would definitely be some sort of rumours or rumblings on social media, even if they ultimately go nowhere.
The whole thing feels underdeveloped – characters are introduced then disappear with no real follow-up or curiosity from Angelina, and the whole idea of the god/demon/whatever it’s supposed to be feels so slotted in, with no clear sense of what the deal is, what this thing’s role is, if women are handed over to be killed or as sex toys.
Unlikeable characters can work, but I think it has to be a deliberate choice by the author, and there needs to be some awareness – we should understand why characters make the decisions they make, but we really don’t get that here. We get a character who bumbles through everything, has no sense of self-preservation, and yet still somehow…well, that would be spoilers, and though I don’t recommend this book, I’m not going to spoil it just in case!
Largely, I felt disappointed – on paper, this should have been totally up my street, but the execution was handled so poorly and there’s a lack of character development, meaning the whole thing feels awfully flat. I will give this author another chance, as I’ve heard good things about Dawson’s other work, but it’ll likely be a while before I do so.
Review by Elle Turpitt
Twitter: @elleturpitt
Bluesky: @elleturpitt.bsky.social
I received this ebook from Titan Books via NetGalley for review consideration.
