“The dark Gothic manor, the omnipresent low fog hugging the thicket of overgrowth… Wait. Is that a hound I hear baying out on the moors?”

27. The Vanishing – Wendy Webb

If there was such thing as a cozy horror novel, this would be a cozy horror novel. It was very easy to read, not scary, and had a big gothic house with a lot of scared-falling in love. I kept wondering how exactly I ended up with it and then realized that I had been looking for haunted house books that were owned by the library and that’s what this is and there is a horror writer who disappeared involved, and a seance. And like I said, very easy to read. It’s not trying to be something it’s not, it’s more so that I’m just not the right person to super enjoy it. If I was the main character, I’d have been repeatedly asking everyone else if they brought me to this nice house to kill me or if it’s really moldy and they’re trying to mess with my allergies and slowly kill me since there wasn’t actually a way to leave.

The house is huge and very thoroughly described. It sounds like it was a fun estate. There are horsies and fluffy dogs and a library with a signed first editions shelf. The dude who takes care of the horsies is attractive and into ladies and there are no other eligible women around for miles and miles, so when the woman leaving her entire life behind to come to this estate shows up, she has dibs automatically. And, yes, too good to be true, it’s haunted, she freaks out several times, there’s a secret reason why she’s there and in the very, very end there’s a little twist that I thought had been coming for quite some time, but I also thought it would be, like, negative, and it’s more like that one X-Files Christmas special. Yes, that one.

Hen Wen demonstrates how to be cozy and skeptical of said coziness because ghosts are supposed to be around.