What happens when a fantasy nerd who mainlines Sanderson and Abercrombie decides to dip into straight-up horror for October? Questionable decisions, that's what.
I grabbed A Haunting: The Horror on Rue Lane during Audible's Plus Catalog rotation because it was free and 8.5 hours felt like a manageable palate cleanser between Stormlight rereads. I was coding at 1 AM - or rather, staring at my procedural generation code while my thesis deadline loomed like one of the ghosts in this book - and figured a haunted house story would keep me awake better than my own research notes. It did. Mostly.
Colonial Charleston Meets Modern Ghost Story (And I'm Here For That Premise)
So here's the setup: Sarah Faust (great surname choice, by the way - Albemont knew what she was doing there) flees some undisclosed bad situation and buys a three-hundred-year-old townhouse in Charleston. The book runs dual timelines - colonial era horrors intercut with Sarah's modern-day discovery of what's lurking at 5 Rue Lane. That narrative structure reminded me of Gone Girl, which does the alternating perspectives thing with razor-sharp precision. And honestly? The dual timeline structure is where this book shines hardest. The colonial sections have this grimy, unsettling texture to them - you get the sense Albemont did her homework on period Charleston, and the historical horror has a different flavor than the modern stuff. It's less jump-scare, more slow creeping dread about what people were capable of centuries ago and what that leaves behind.
The world-building here isn't Sanderson-level - let's be real, nothing in an 8-hour haunted house book is going to have hard magic systems and Cosmere-level interconnectivity - but the sense of place is strong. Charleston as a setting carries a lot of weight. Old port city, complicated history, Spanish moss and crumbling facades hiding ugly secrets. It works.
But here's where my enthusiasm starts to wobble. The climax gets genuinely muddy. Like, I was listening at 1x speed, fully focused, and I still hit the final act thinking "wait, what just happened?" There's this lack of explanation or character reaction to the big reveals that left me feeling like I'd missed a chapter. Sarah encounters what should be the payoff for 7+ hours of buildup and the book kind of... shrugs? It's the narrative equivalent of rolling a nat 20 on investigation and the DM saying "you find something interesting" and moving on.
Teri Schnaubelt Does Solid Work With Uneven Material
Schnaubelt's narration is competent and steady. She's not Steven Pacey - nobody is - but she handles the tone well. Her pacing suits the slow-burn atmosphere, and she doesn't oversell the scary moments, which I actually appreciated. Horror narration can go wrong fast when narrators start hamming it up. She keeps it grounded.
That said, I wouldn't call it a performance that elevates the material. It's professional, clean, does the job. The character voices don't have a ton of distinction between them, which matters less in a book with a relatively small cast but is still noticeable. She's good. Not great. The kind of narrator where you finish and think "yeah, that was fine" and don't rush to see what else she's done.
The Animal Thing (Content Warning, Seriously)
I need to flag this because it caught me off guard. There are animal slaughter scenes in this book that feel... gratuitous? I'm not squeamish - I've listened to The First Law trilogy multiple times, I can handle dark content - but these scenes didn't serve the story. They felt like the horror equivalent of padding your D&D campaign with random encounters because you didn't prep enough plot. If animal cruelty is a hard line for you, this is a skip. It genuinely felt like grasping for shock value in a story that had enough atmospheric dread to not need it.
Who's Rolling Initiative On This One
If you love Southern Gothic atmosphere and dual-timeline haunted house stories, this is a decent 8-hour listen. It's not going to rewire your brain or keep you up at night (I read this instead of writing my thesis, and I still slept fine). But the Charleston setting is evocative, the colonial-era sections have genuine creep factor, and at under 9 hours it doesn't overstay its welcome.
Skip it if you need your horror to stick the landing. The muddy climax is a real problem. Also skip if animal violence is a dealbreaker.
My Character Sheet Says "Mildly Entertained"
It's a solid library borrow. Good atmosphere, decent narration, fascinating premise that doesn't quite deliver on its promise. The kind of book where the setup is better than the payoff - like a DM who builds incredible lore but can't run combat to save their life. I don't regret the 8 hours, but I'm not going to remember this one by next October.
