Title/Author: Shutter by Courtney Alameda
Publication Date/Publisher: February 3, 2015/Feiwel and Friends
Series: No, but I feel like it might be
Source and Format: I received this book for free from the publisher. This in no way affected my opinion of the book, or the content of my review.
Rating: 2 stars
From Goodreads:
Micheline Helsing is a tetrachromat—a girl who sees the auras of the undead in a prismatic spectrum. As one of the last descendants of the Van Helsing lineage, she has trained since childhood to destroy monsters both corporeal and spiritual: the corporeal undead go down by the bullet, the spiritual undead by the lens. With an analog SLR camera as her best weapon, Micheline exorcises ghosts by capturing their spiritual energy on film. She’s aided by her crew: Oliver, a techno-whiz and the boy who developed her camera’s technology; Jude, who can predict death; and Ryder, the boy Micheline has known and loved forever.
When a routine ghost hunt goes awry, Micheline and the boys are infected with a curse known as a soulchain. As the ghostly chains spread through their bodies, Micheline learns that if she doesn’t exorcise her entity in seven days or less, she and her friends will die. Now pursued as a renegade agent by her monster-hunting father, Leonard Helsing, she must track and destroy an entity more powerful than anything she’s faced before . . . or die trying.
Lock, stock, and lens, she’s in for one hell of a week.
Shutter just did not work for me. The super eye-rolling started when I saw “analog DSLR” on the back of the book – thankfully this was caught and changed for the final copy (though “analog SLR” is not much better) – and died down once I got into the story…but I just couldn’t connect to the Micheline and I couldn’t connect the writing to the story (more on that later).
I felt like the fact that ghosties were just a part of life in the world of Shutter was really interesting and that the use of a camera as a weapon against the creepy crawlies of the world could have been MORE interesting – it would have worked better for me if Micheline wasn’t the only person who did that. If it’s the only way to get rid of the spiritual undead, shouldn’t everyone be doing it? Unless being a tetrachromat is a requirement for that, it just doesn’t make sense to me (this might have been explained – I did a fair bit of skimming).
Horror isn’t my favorite genre. I’ve never been scared from reading a book, so it can often come across as cheesy to me. I would much rather read some campy horror than something trying to be serious. Shutter is trying to be serious, and has characters that are all very military-esque, so the purple-y prose doesn’t quite suit it. It’s not so bad that I would call it purple, but it’s definitely lavender. It would be a much better fit to a contemporary.
That’s not to say Courtney Alameda is without skill. This particular book didn’t draw me in in the way that I would have liked (there was only about ten pages where I was REALLY into it), but I would definitely read something else from her – just not a sequel to Shutter.
Paperback Heart 