The Apartment
Author: S. L. Grey

Mark and Steph have a relatively happy family with their young daughter in sunny Cape Town until one day when armed men in balaclavas break in to their home. Left traumatized but physically unharmed, Mark and Steph are unable to return to normal and live in constant fear. When a friend suggests a restorative vacation abroad via a popular house swapping website, it sounds like the perfect plan. They find a genial, artistic couple with a charming apartment in Paris who would love to come to Cape Town. Mark and Steph can’t resist the idyllic, light-strewn pictures, and the promise of a romantic getaway. But once they arrive in Paris, they quickly realize that nothing is as advertised. When their perfect holiday takes a violent turn, the cracks in their marriage grow ever wider and dark secrets from Mark's past begin to emerge.

Deftly weaving together two complex and compelling narrators, S. L. Grey builds an intimate and chilling novel of a disintegrating marriage in the wake of a very real trauma. The Apartment is a terrifying and tour-de-force of horror, of psychological thrills, and of haunting suspense.

I thought this was a very unsettling ghost story. Mark and Steph live in Cape Town, South Africa with their young daughter, Hayden. Then they experience a home invasion that leaves them very shaken and nervous living in their home. At the suggestion of a friend, they end up doing an apartment swap to provide for a cheap way to go to Paris for what they hope will be a calming experience. But when they get there, they find the apartment to be a hellish dump with a very disturbing background. No one is living there other than a squatter in an upper apartment. The place is dirty and musty and contains some unpleasantness like buckets of hair in the closet. The person upstairs warns them to leave and then later commits suicide by jumping out a window. Mark and Steph do leave early but something seems to go with them...a specter that makes Mark think his dead daughter from a prior marriage has returned. The novel is told from alternate perspectives by Mark and Steph. While Steph feels that Mark is going insane, Mark tries to find out why his dead daughter seems to be haunting him. All of this leads to a somewhat shocking conclusion.

Overall, a mild recommendation for this one with its overall brooding atmosphere and sense of foreboding.

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Creepy little ghost story. Hints of how it is going to end kept me going.

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