White Smoke by Tiffany D Jackson

 Welcome Back, Booklovers! It's fall and time to grab all the horror and dark fantasy reads. I received an arc from Harper Collins in exchange for an honest review. The cover was cute and a haunted house story sounded interesting. Horror is a genre I really started reading more last year and I'm finding that I like books that are dark and make my heart race.  So I was ready to dive into White Smoke. 

Marigold Anderson and her family have moved to Cedarville for a fresh start. Change is good. Change is necessary. Change is needed. Or at least that's the mantra she keeps repeating to herself. As part of an artist's residency she and her newly blended family will be living is a restored historic house. They're so happy they don't even care that the street is nearly abandoned and that they're not allowed to step foot in the basement. But suddenly Mari is seeing things and they're hearing rumors about their new home. 

What is with gentrification thrillers and bedbugs? I will say it instantly made me think of When No One is Watching. As did the corporate conspiracies. I had to deal with a bed bug infestation before and I'm still traumatized so I felt Mari on making sure everything is clean. If I think I see a random black dot on my sheets or my skin just feels too itchy I freak out too. My fear is nowhere near as debilitating as hers but just seeing or hearing the word bed bugs makes my skin crawl. Random bed bug facts were one of Mari's tics. But those didn't really add anything for me.

I don't recommend the audiobook because I found the narration to be kind of flat. She has a nice standard contemporary voice which worked well for the scenes where they were just hanging out but her voice didn't change during the more action packed scenes. I've listened to author horror novels on audio that really set the tone and this narration didn't. I ended up going back and rereading the entire middle sections.

This was a fast-paced read that packed a lot of social commentary in it but I don't think it really took the time to deep dive into said commentary. It felt like two books to me. The legalization/criminalization of marijuana storyline could've been in it's own book by itself. 

And I felt like there was some fear mongering when it came to the discussion about weed. She overdosed on fentanyl laced weed but not the Percocet she was snorting! I'm not even someone who endorses teens smoking and I wasn't a teen who did it but most of my friends did. It's very common so I actually thought it would be normalized here. Instead it's easy for Mari to write off the creepy things like being followed and watched as paranoia over her anxiety and weed habit.

The last 25% was where it really started coming together and then it abruptly ended. I liked the commentary around the blended family making things work despite their differences. I think that I would've loved this book had it left some of the other plots to a different book. It felt like a detractor breaking up the momentum of the story.  I never got that heart-racing sensation I craved. I did feel itchy from the bed bug scenes. When the main focus was the scary things going on in the house the book worked best. I would've liked the writing to be a little more descriptive though because I couldn't picture what the house looked like. 

The author clearly didn't know what type of book she wanted so how was I supposed to follow along and care? If you're not really into scary reads and just like confusion than this will probably be a good starter horror. Bad Witch Burning had perfect narration and strong well discussed social commentary that wove in seamlessly with the fantasy/horror aspects and it's one I would reach for first.