Review: The Flowers at Flood House by J.J. Walker

      

Print Length: 106 pages

Publisher: After Dusk Press (July 31, 2025)

From Goodreads.com:  Flood House was meant to be a fresh start. A quiet escape in Stillwater where Seth Dorsey could care for his mother, caught in dementia's grip.

But when Seth wakes up to dried flowers he didn’t hang in his basement and starts noticing unsettling changes in and around the house, he’s forced to ask whether the unexplainable is real, or something more sinister is at work.

The Flowers at Flood House is a horror novella that offers a new twist on the haunted house. An unsettling tale that takes readers on a dark and supernatural descent into loss, grief, and coming face-to-face with the memories that haunt us.

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My Rating: 2 stars out of 5

This book was simply..... weird. I think a large part of why I found it so strange is because it is a novella so there is absolutely nothing about this story that is fleshed out to its true potential. 

Let's begin with the house. I'm still not sure what the heck was going on here. Random things seem to change, but they are so slight (except for the flowers in the basement) that at first people don't notice them? A new carpet in the hallway, or a photograph hanging where there wasn't one before. There were other things that happened as well (such as voices and apparitions), but I'm going to discuss them a bit later on when I get to the overall plot. 

Then we have the characters'. First we have Seth and his mother. We know that his mother is suffering from dementia and that due to her erratic behaviors neither of them are well-liked in the quiet town of Stillwater. In fact, Yanna seems to be the only person in the entire town who shows any kind of compassion towards them. But of course her sister Gina, who also happens to be a high ranking member of the police department loathes them causing her and Yanna to argue like a pair of high-schoolers for seemingly no reason. Oh, and Seth and Yanna are able to trauma bond a little bit over losing someone close to them, and they seem to have crushes on each other. Do you see what I mean? It's hard to even care about these characters when we know so little about them. 

And finally, the plot. This was probably the most confusing piece of it all because the synopsis says that this book "takes readers on a dark and supernatural descent into loss, grief, and coming face-to-face with the memories that haunt us" except, it doesn't. Yes Seth and Yanna have both experienced grief and loss in their lives, but the house doesn't reflect any of that. Instead it focuses on something else that tragically happened in the house in the past that wasn't resolved. None of the "memories" the house shows them has anything to do with them, or their losses. 

At the end of the day, for me, this book didn't deliver on what it promised, but I think that is more because the author needed more time to really bring this idea to life. They have a solid and descriptive writing style and enough plot points that I hope in the future they decide to revisit this idea, not only fleshing everything out more, but also adding more horror elements as right now, I would call this one more a psychological thriller than a horror. 

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.