HOLY SH*T. What the hell did I just read? and more importantly how the hell do I review it without spoilers?

Fans of Sarah Pinborough and the incredible Behind Her Eyes with the tagline #WTFthatending should be getting very excited. Sarah’s new book WE LIVE HERE NOW is out next June 2025. I was lucky enough to read an early copy a few weeks ago. I still can’t work out how to write this review.

The story revolves around Emily and Freddie. They are a married couple who have moved from London into a huge country house on the edges of Dartmoor. Emily is recovering from an almost-tragic holiday accident which left her in a coma. The move is meant to help in her healing. However, Freddie still has to commute to London for work. This leaves Emily alone for days on end isolated and far from her friends and support network.

She’s struggling emotionally and physically since the accident and begins to see and hear strange things in the house. Convinced the house is haunted, she starts investigating it’s past and starts to uncover some really dark secrets.

That is ALL I am saying about the plot, but I will say this: Sarah Pinborough has a really vivid and disturbed imagination and in my opinion, WE LIVE HERE NOW is as equally brilliant as Behind Her Eyes.

Clever, spooky, amusing and absolutely UNPUTDOWNABLE, the queen of cross-genre WTF fiction has done it again,

5 HUGE STARS

Y'all I wasn't ready for this book. I was not prepared!!!

I went into this one not sure what to expect. I've never read this author before so I wasn't sure what lay ahead within the pages of this book. Right off the bat something ominous lingers in the air. You just know that something is off yet you can't put your finger on it.

The main characters both have something to hide which amps up the suspense and mystery. The dual POVs kept me turning the pages. I was so anxious to find out what was really going on beneath the surface. The gothic horror feel of the book immediately pulled me in and the psychological aspect kept me there. I love an unreliable narrator.

As I read on things became even more intense and secrets started to come out that has my spine tingling with anticipation. I didn't just read this book, I absorbed it. When the truth of what was happening was revealed. You could have knocked me over with a feather. Did I not mention I was NOT prepared. Off all the things I imagined, THAT was not one of them. That ending was perfection! I couldn't have thought of a more unsettling ending. A masterpiece of a book!

Thank you to Netgalley, Orion Publishing and Sarah Pinborough for my eARC of this book. All opinions are my own.

I grew up watching and reading horror. Devouring it, you might say. From Stephen King, to James Herbert, traditional tomes such as Dracula, or a good old fashioned ghost story - I love them. One of my favourites has to be The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, and that whole theme of ghostly goings on is a theme I will keep coming back to, especially where it is done well.

With We Live Here Now, Sarah Pinborough has done this exceptionally well. From the very beginning you get the spine tingling sense of something very dark emanating from the aura of Larkin Lodge, and I love how she chose to make this sentiment, this enduring and encroaching sense of dread known to us as readers. The symbolism of this early narrator, the fact that they understand and yet cannot articulate it, is just perfect and underlines that gothic essence that feed the story. But, unlike Jackon’s Hill House, whatever it is that walks within the lodge, it does not intend to walk there alone - or at least not for long.

Now from very early on in this book I was put in mind of a particular horror film, which to me absolute shock I have discovered is now 20 years old. I don’t want to name it for fear this may constitute a slight spoiler, but it really drew me deeper into the story, wondering if this could be the force behind the strange and nerve jangling goings on. In a very minor way, I guess I was right, but with a very clear distinction between the two. So if I were to take Hill House and this movie as a starting block, the truth lies somewhere between the two and, for me, they made perfect bedfellows.

Speaking of perfect bedfellows, or rather lack there of, the main protagonists in this book, Emily and Freddie, are just to perfectly imperfect that they make for compelling reading. Neither, in truth, is particularly sympathetic but to say that they seem to bring out the worst in each other is only telling half of the story. At times I felt to drawn to one of them, at other times, the other. But they have a complex history, and a plethora of secrets between them that only serves to stoke and fan the flames of conflict, leading to a deliciously dark descent into marital disharmony.

Sarah Pinborough’s writing is, as ever, absolutely top notch. The pacing is perfect, the imagery strong and chilling, and her ability to draw out the strange and unusual and make the seemingly impossible entirely plausible, at least in terms of this story, is one of the key things I loved about the book. It is not her most dramatically out of left field twist, but it is a brilliant take on some classic tropes, and blended with a sense of the gothic and the ghostly, it had me completely hooked.

If you love a gothic ghost tale, with unreliable,and sometimes unexpected, narrators, or even just a modern spin on a classic ghost story, then I’d definitely recommend this book. A mahossive thumbs (nails) up from me.