Title: The Girl from the Well Series: The Girl from the Well #1
Author: Rin Chupeco
Published: August 5, 2014
Genre(s): Horror
Page Count: 267
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:A dead girl walks the streets.
She hunts murderers. Child killers, much like the man who threw her body down a well three hundred years ago.
And when a strange boy bearing stranger tattoos moves into the neighborhood so, she discovers, does something else. And soon both will be drawn into the world of eerie doll rituals and dark Shinto exorcisms that will take them from American suburbia to the remote valleys and shrines of Aomori, Japan.
Because the boy has a terrifying secret—one that would just kill to get out.
I knew enough before I began reading to understand that The Girl from the Well isn’t a very scary horror novel—if it’s even a horror novel at all. Understanding that, I was able to appreciate other aspects of Rin Chupeco’s debut, as this book truly is a lot of fun. I read a review that compared this to an episode of Supernatural, and that sounds just about right.
The author’s choice in narrator is a bit strange, as the perspective is a mostly observatory one. Though one could argue that Callie and Tarquin, cousins, are the protagonists of The Girl from the Well, the book’s narrator is Okiku, a vengeful-yet-benevolent ghost who happens to have taken an interest in the demon possessing Tarquin. Because Okiku isn’t necessarily a “main” character, and because she’s a ghost, there’s a certain distance between the reader and the events and characters. I didn’t mind that separation too much, but I also think that the book would have been better if the reader had been closer to the story.
In the same vein, I think that the characters were fairly under-developed. Anything we know about Callie or Tarquin come from Okiku’s outside observations of their actions or conversation, so they often come across as two-dimensional. This, again, wasn’t a huge issue, since the book’s appeal lies more in the story it has to tell, rather than the depth of its characters.
Plot is really where The Girl from the Well shines, as Chupeco’s storytelling takes readers to Japan and unveils some interesting rituals and beliefs. I can’t say how accurate all that is, but since this is a ghost-story and not historical fiction, I find that I was able to enjoy what was happening at face-value. This is truly like the YA version of Supernatural, which basically means the story was fast-paced, sometimes silly, and full of ghosts.
While not particularly scary or well-developed, The Girl from the Well is still an enjoyable and fun novel that doesn’t try to take itself too seriously. Rin Chupeco offers readers horror-lite, and to great success. I’m not sure I’ll find this to be very memorable or affecting down the road, but it’s a book I’m glad to have picked up all the same.
