Crooked Tales: The Rising opens with Crooked House – a decaying, malevolent place teeming with dark spirits who hunger for control over everything and everyone within their reach. From the very first pages, author Chris Harrison establishes a suffocating atmosphere that makes the house feel like a living, breathing entity, one that is patient, cunning, and utterly merciless.
At the heart of the story are Kane and JJ, teenage influencers who are always chasing their next thrill for content. When they decide that exploring the notorious Crooked House will make for the perfect viral video, they bring along Kane’s younger brother Zach and two of his friends. It’s a decision that quickly spirals into something far more terrifying than any of them could have anticipated. What begins as a reckless adventure transforms into a desperate fight for survival as the group comes face to face with the ghosts and a monstrous presence that has claimed the house as its domain and does not take kindly to visitors.
Harrison uses his young cast wisely. Kane and JJ’s influencer personas give the story a contemporary, relatable edge, while Zach and his friends add a layer of vulnerability that raises the emotional stakes considerably. You genuinely care about these characters, which makes every jump scare land that much harder. And there are plenty of them. Harrison has a sharp instinct for pacing, knowing exactly when to let the tension simmer and when to unleash something truly frightening. The monster at the centre of Crooked House is particularly well-conceived: unsettling in its design, unpredictable in its behaviour, and genuinely scary in a way that feels earned rather than gratuitous.
The story doesn’t wrap up neatly once the friends escape the house, which is where things get really interesting. Far from being free, they soon discover that Crooked House has followed them; or rather, that it never truly let them go. The hauntings that pursue them outside its walls ratchet up the dread and momentum, turning the second half of the book into a breathless race to outrun a threat that seems to grow stronger the more they resist it.
As the first instalment in the Crooked Tales series, The Rising does exactly what a series opener should: it builds a vivid and frightening world, populates it with characters worth rooting for, and leaves you desperate for more. True to its name, this story has well and truly risen and if this book is anything to go by, the series has an enormously exciting future ahead of it. I can’t wait to get my hands on book two.
My Rating: 4.6/5
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
Leave a Reply