Review: The No-End House by Jeremy Bates

   

Print Length: 320 pages

Publisher: Kensington Books (June 24, 2025)

From Goodreads.com: Nine rooms. Nine tests. One chance to get out alive.

Bestselling author Jeremy Bates invites you to spend the night in The No-End House. Where the nightmares begin as soon as you enter—and the terror never ends . . .

It’s the ultimate haunted house challenge. A crumbling stone mansion nestled in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona, it may be the best-kept secret in Europe—a little-known attraction featuring nine escape rooms to explore, nine puzzles to solve, and a large cash prize for anyone who makes it to the end. There’s just one catch: no one makes it to the end of The No-End House. . . .

When Joe Hadfield hears about the house from a pair of backpackers, he’s intrigued but not interested. He’s trying to escape a nightmare of his own: the trauma of witnessing his wife’s grisly death. Traveling the world to ease his pain and grief, he meets a beautiful stranger named Helen who convinces him to try The No-End challenge together. Joe reluctantly agrees. But as soon as they enter its walls, meet its mysterious host—and sign an ominous contract—Joe begins to understand the seductive power of The No-End House . . .

It knows his darkest secrets. It feeds his greatest fears. It makes him do things he would never do. And there is no end to what he will do . . . to make it out alive.

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My Rating: 1 star out of 5

The blub for this book is seriously misleading. I went into it thinking I was getting an escape-room style horror novel. You know high-stakes puzzles, a heavy dash of psychological tension, and clever twists much like the SAW movies the book claimed to emulate . Instead, what I got was... a surreal look into how grief affects people, maybe? Although it came with a very healthy  side of what the heck did I just read?

I mean right off the bat we are told that Joe's wife died because she walked into the still moving propeller of a Cessna airplane, that she had just landed on her last supervised flight towards her pilot's license. You mean to tell me all of the other times she has flown, she wouldn't have known the propeller takes time to stop moving? She wouldn't have known to avoid it? She couldn't HEAR it still moving?  I almost just DNF'ed the book then because that's not horrific, that's death by stupidity. 

To be fair, the book does offer some creative horror within its pages. The individual rooms are imaginative, ranging from eerie mind games to straight up survival scenarios, and there are moments that get under your skin. But sadly, even when things ramped up, the pacing felt off to me with the transitions from room to room feeling disjointed, leaving me more confused than invested. And while the overall atmosphere had flashes of potential, with a few scenes being genuinely unsettling, the often silly, awkward and just out of place dialogue would immediately yank me right back out of the story. This was in part because I struggled to connect with the characters as Helen came off as unnecessarily bossy and rude, while the Joe seemed oddly passive about it. Like even when his gut was screaming at him not to sign the contract, not to do the haunted house, he still was browbeat into doing it by her. This made their dynamic feel forced and unconvincing.

And that ending? Man did that leave me with questions than answers. I’m not against ambiguity, but this felt like a puzzle I was still missing pieces to. Did Joe actually make it out? Was he ever actually IN the maze to being with or was this some kind of grief induced psychosis?   

All things considered, this book was giving me heavy internet creepypasta vibes, and honestly? This book should have stayed in the vault.

DISCLAIMER: I received a complimentary copy of this novel from the publisher. This has not affected my review in any way. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are 100% my own.