Shockadelica by Jon O’Bergh

Bookbaby, 2021

ISBN: 9781098372415

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

Shockadelica is a suspense/horror ghost story that uses the tried and true tools of an old apartment building with mysterious noises in the night.  The premise has worked for many authors over the years, but Shockadelica never quite gets the story off the ground floor.  It’s an extremely dialogue-heavy story, and it’s difficult to keep the reader’s interest through the entire 252 pages.

Drag queen Kendall and his buddy Jenna start hearing unexplainable noises in their apartment building, and they soon learn that their neighbors do as well.  Feeling that an actual haunting would be great material for their “all things horror” weekly podcast, Kendall and Jenna investigate, and learn that the building has a sinister history.  The rest is a mystery as they try to find the source of the noises in the building, and whether it is a true haunt, or human nature with an evil purpose.

It’s a decent premise, just very slow moving.  The first 130 pages consist almost entirely of Kendall and Jenna interviewing the building’s other inhabitants to learn what they may have seen or heard.  The dialogue is  straightforward, without much injection of the characters’ personalities.  Hearing about the “hauntings” secondhand through dialogue with the other residents hurts the story’s excitement level. Describing the incidents as they actually happen from a narrative point of view would have helped; the few times the hauntings are narrated by the author are pretty good, and doing it more would have helped a great deal.   The story doesn’t start building real interest until around page 186.  The payoff at the end of the book is decent and there is a nice touch of Irish folk legend involved, it’s just questionable if readers will make it that far.

As for the characters, the secondary ones help the story more than the primary ones.  Kendall and Jenna are uninspiring characters; outside of talking about dresses, they don’t do much and generate minimal interest or sympathy.  Fleshing them out more would have helped.  The secondary characters are eclectic and have a little more life.  Vince, the goth/metal musician, is fun, and Rooney is probably the best.  She makes her living doing bogus written and video reviews for products she’s never used, and her adventures between the building walls trying to scare her annoying neighbor add some much-needed flair.  It’s too bad the main characters weren’t as entertaining.

Shockadelica may appeal to some readers who like stories with a lot of exposition, but most readers will probably want to skip this one.

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson