One of those audiobooks I actively looked for opportunities to listen to, instead of just having it on while I do other things that don’t require concentration. I have to admit my bias here, in that the pitch of “ghost story with a steady IV drip of cosmic horror during the renovation of a ruined Elizabethan house” is *extremely* my thing. Some readers may have less tolerance for the details of the renovation, but for me it was a good, ah, foundation for the uncanny to steadily erode. Haunted house stories have a long tradition of also being stories about finances: people who are tied to something horrible not by being trapped in a dungeon with it, but because their hopes and dreams depend on this place somehow, against increasingly slim odds, working out for the better. Ashes continues in that tradition from a fresh perspective, as the renovation uncovers fresh horrors that seem to warn Patricia to turn back before it’s too late, even as genre-savvy readers know that she’s in it ‘til the bitter end.
Speaking of the end, it is, as other reviewers have pointed out, a bit abrupt, which seems to happen in a lot of horror fiction. I would have gladly taken Ashes in the form of a full-length novel rather than novella, to give that ending a bit more room to breathe, but novel-length horror has its own troubles to deal with. That said, the ending is perfectly comprehensible, and I disagree entirely on the “no closure” comment in an earlier review. We know very much what happened after the final sentence of Ashes, but that’s all I can say on the subject. As an aside, it’s all too common to find reviews of perfectly-crafted short horror fiction which read something to the effect of, “a bunch of chapters cut out from larger stories, one star.” Frankly, I suspect there are folks here who are looking for a tidier wrap-up than short horror fiction as a genre likes to provide.
Seconding those reviews that praise Diana Croft’s reading. Audio is an unforgiving medium for horror, where the narrator needs to impart an emotional state to the listener in addition to conveying the personalities of the characters and having a voice that’s a good match for the subject matter. Croft nailed Patricia’s mounting frustration, distress, denial, and horror, and managed to pull off tricky Elizabethan passages in the journal which plays such a prominent role in Ashes without sounding like a bad stereotype. I’ll certainly be keeping an eye out in case she reads more horror, or, really, anything.