“Ten strangers. An old dark house. A killer picking them off one by one.” So starts the blurb of C.B. Everett’s The Other People. Throw into the mix a missing girl who needs to be saved and you have the recipe for a dark and compelling thriller.
What Is The Other People?
The Other People is a riff on the classic And Then There Were None format. Ten people wake up in an old stately home. A woman, Amanda, interrupts their dinner to tell them that they must save a girl from a serial killer. Claire Swanson has been kidnapped, buried alive, and given 24 hours to live. If the ten people in the house can work out where she is, they can save her.
Amanda is shot mid-sentence and panic ensues. The visitors start to investigate the house, searching for the killer. Then they start dying, too. If that wasn’t frightening enough, there are 10 portraits on the landing, showing each of the visitors to the house. When they die, the portraits change to depict the manner of their demise. Then the bodies start disappearing.
What is going on? You’ll be desperate to know as soon as you start reading.
Why Read The Other People?
I haven’t read such a compelling thriller in some time. There’s a lot packed into 300 pages.
The characters and their interactions are all engaging, as is the mysterious narrator “The Beast in the Cellar.” This voice has chapters interspersed throughout the narrative and seems to know what is going on in the house. Yet, we know from the outset that this voice is an unreliable one.
As the narrative progresses, lots of what is happening inside the house seems impossible. These macabre tones are part of what makes the novel so compelling. But does it all hold up to the finish? This is the hardest trick to pull off with these Last Man Standing/Locked Room mysteries. Literary flips, twirls, and misdirects are useless if the author can’t stick the dismount.
Does C.B. Everett land on both feet, or is The Other People a faceplant into the mat? I wouldn’t be writing this review if I didn’t think he’d pulled it off. And with aplomb, too.
I can see that some people may find the final reveal preposterous, but for me, it neatly navigates the line between sublime and ridiculous. The denouement did stretch my sense of disbelief, but the quality of the book and how engaged I was with the story and its characters enabled me to do so. It was audacious clever, and while I might have raised an eyebrow, I could appreciate what C.B Everett was aiming to do.
The Other People is a compelling mystery that kept me hanging out for more the whole way through. There are lots of unexpected thrills, and the novel is genuinely chilling in places. It’s hard to predict what will be a bestseller in the book world, but this has all the hallmarks of a word-of-mouth smash.
One final note. I’m intrigued by the differences between the two covers. The same template has been used, but the mysterious “beast in the cellar” features in the US edition. Why might this be? There’s no suggestion of the supernatural in the UK version. Is that because it would turn away readers, or do the publishers want to make sure US readers know they’re not getting a straight-up thriller? I don’t have any answers, but my curiosity is piqued!
If you would like to pick up a copy of The Other People, you can do so here in the US and here, in the UK. (Affiliate Links)
If you enjoyed this review, check out my other book reviews, here.
I received a copy of this book in order to write this review.
