As an escape room fan and frequent participant in lock room challenges, I was very excited about this book and its premise. The first 50 or so percent were very good; the banter between Joe and Helen was sweet. I really liked them as a pair of protagonists. They were also very funny and entertaining, I laughed often in the first half, but after the Jurassic section it all fizzled out for me. Apologies, but I’m not an eight year old boy and I don’t get excited about dinosaurs.
The “rooms” of the No-end House were interesting and progressively challenging, there were some goofy elements and historical periods presented in an original way. I really liked Hellen’s back story, it gave her depth and it made her more of a badass character. Joe was okay; I found it very charming that the narrator’s name was also Joe. He did a really good job narrating the male and female parts; also some of the accents were done pretty well.
What get me off the high ride here, besides the dinosaurs, is the how the relationship between Joe and Helen progressed and the strong words they tell each other at some point. I didn’t find it genuine and I feel like this made them sound more like a teenagers that a 40 year old grownups.
The last room was underwhelming and honestly pretty disappointing. It was more of an action packed final act. I prefer more of a psychological and emotional impact, which didn’t deliver. This was less of a horror, more of a high stakes action, adventure thriller with fantastical elements. I wish we got more of a history and origin of the house, but by the end it wasn’t really needed. You get no hard answers and I was okay with that. I liked the ending, I wasn’t sure where this was going, since there were some 27 min left from the final room, but I’m glad it went that way.
Overall, this was pretty good and entertaining, with a bit of a nonsense in the middle, but a good ending. I feel like this book deserves more love and I hope it will reach its audience. 3.5 stars
Thank you to NetGalley and RBmedia | Tantor Audio for providing me with the ALC.

Thanks to NetGalley for this advanced audio preview! While the characters themselves seemed a little ridiculous, the premise and action were a lot of fun. I tend to enjoy books and movies where there is one challenge after another, and this kept up the suspense by providing new and horrible things happening to the main characters. (There should have been a better explanation of why they would even agree to take on this house) Since it was an audiobook,I got to feel entertained, because the narration was perfect for staying in the action.

I was very excited for this book, especially given the description. However, I found the two main characters, Joe and Helen, to be too comical and far too ordinary to be interesting. I don’t know why Joe let himself be so easily talked into going into this haunted house that he was so set against going into. And I didn’t buy the fact that he would just so seamlessly let this woman be barely knew sign him up to take a walk through nine haunted rooms. Also, none of these rooms were scary. I found nothing about this book to be terrifying or horror-like. The dialogue contributed to this feeling, especially since it was very cringey and awkward.

As for the audio, I have listened to several books where Joe Hempel has been the narrator and he’s done fairly well. I like him as a narrator, but I do think he does better with books that are actually scary. While his voice here captured the awkward dialogue well (whether that was intentional or the dialogue was too unnatural to be read in any other way I’m not sure), I had a hard time appreciating his talents as a narrator with this particular story. Again, this might have been because the story did not present itself to be scary or thrilling whatsoever. Overall, I thought this book was a bit of a let down and the narrator’s talents are better served in books where the scare factor is much higher.

Backpacking through Spain, Joe meets a woman and together they agree to take on a locked room challenge at an old estate in Barcelona. The escape room actually consists of nine different rooms with nine different horrors. This book takes off like a rocket, but somewhere around midway, the author seems to lose steam. I enjoyed the story, even though it went in directions that I really would not have deemed horror novel stuff, I’m just a little disappointed because it was a good story that had the potential to be an excellent story

*I received an arc of the audiobook from NetGalley*

Outline:

This book follows Joe, a man in his 40’s, who is walking around the world after the death of his wife. In Barcelona, he meets Helen at the hostel he is staying at. Together, they decide to take part in a haunted house competition in the Gothic quarter. All they have to do is complete the challenges set for them in 9 rooms. Easy?
Far from it.
Neither of them could predict the mind-altering nature of the No-End house.

My review:
The characters of Joe and Helen started out as believable and well rounded, but the same could not be said for the rest. A certain little person’s portrayal (I will not use their name for spoilers) specifically felt rather offensive and unnecessary. Besides the main two, no one had any depth.
The plot began pretty intriguing, if you ignored the big flaws. Neither Joe nor Helen really needed the prize money, and it was an incredibly small amount, even before they knew the danger they would face.
The ending annoyed me. I won’t say what it was, but it was unclear and I found myself not caring what was or wasn’t true.
Given that the book began with vibes similar to the film ‘Hostel’, the fairytale elements actively annoyed me. It was around the 50% mark that this book lost me. I completed it anyway but it was a slog

For the audiobook version, I found the narrator to be a believable voice for the character, and his overall performance to be of a high quality.

As a whole, the writing was immersive with some visceral descriptions that left me feeling as uncomfortable as the characters, but this was overshadowed by the sub-par plot.

Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for providing a free audio arc in exchange for an honest review.

Unfortunately this is a DNF for me at 48% in. The premise of this book sounded really interesting and started off good with getting into the competition for the escape room really gearing up like it was going to be like a slasher horror. What this ended up being was a bad acid trip (or mushroom trip). Insectoid like monsters, traveling back in time, just a hodgepodge of things that were thrown in there that really took me out of the story. If the author would have stuck to a more escape room story with people hunting the characters down and delving more into their stories it would have kept my interest, but this was just a little too out there for me.