The Cellar by A J Whitten

Again, many thanks to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for letting me read this book!

Romeo and Juliet meet the living dead…

There’s something strange about the new guy… That would be fine if “strange” meant that the new guy had an obsession with frogs or that he reads his books backwards, but nothing’s that simple anymore…

After Meredith Willis’ dad dies in a car accident, she’s the only one who’s kept it all together, the only one that is “normal” in her family; her sister Heather blames herself for causing the car crash and won’t let herself be happy and her mum has become a shopaholic in order to deal with the stress and grief.

So when a new neighbour in sunglasses and a red hot Camaro moves into the old, run down home next to Meredith’s and becomes the non-stop talk of the school… Meredith can’t help but be suspicious. Unexplainable things happen to her whenever she’s around Adrien St. Germain, bugs crawling up her legs, vultures following her to school…

So in order to find information on the mysterious Adrien, Meredith sneaks a look into his windows and discovers in the cellar a deep dark secret that could destroy them all…

Unfortunately, Heather doesn’t feel the same way about Adrien as Meredith does, she argues that Adrien is the only person that understands how she feels. With every step that Heather takes towards Adrien, the more danger that she is putting her family in, can Meredith stop her before it’s too late?

I found The Cellar very enjoyable, the characters were strong and the story had romance, but not a sickening amount of it. And combined with the mystery and horror, it was an absolute blast! I found the character Heather slightly annoying, she was selfish and too trusting! But of course she was a huge part of the book, without her, The Cellar would have been very different. I also liked the fact that living dead in this novel had actual emotions and could actually think, it’s different compared to other novels where all the zombies are mindless corpses running around trying to eat people, it was a pleasant surprise!

4 out of 5 stars!