Emily Bell's Reviews > The Cellar

What I Liked
The best part about The Cellar is its potential. The premise is fascinating and the reason I picked up the book to read in the first place. Four pretty girls held captive in a basement, named after flowers. The thrill of a kidnapping and hopeful escape.

What I Didn't Like
The writing in this book simply isn't up to par. There is almost no descriptive language. At the end of The Cellar, I sat and stared at the last page, thinking, "What did Poppy even look like? For that matter, what did Summer or Lewis look like?" The only detailed description that stuck out in the entire book is of Clover. He is tall, dark, and has heavily-hairsprayed hair.

There is no real emotion to be found. A phrase I've been told by English professors at university is, "Show, don't tell." An example of this would be writing "My heart sank to my toes" instead of "I was scared." Natasha Preston is constantly telling instead of showing in The Cellar. There are never vivid emotions that Summer or Lewis seem to feel. Their emotions are written plainly on the page, which leaves every character vanilla and pretend. (view spoiler)[Even after Summer is rescued, her recovery is unrealistic. She heals extremely quickly and well from a terrifying ordeal where she is kidnapped, raped, and forced to witness multiple murders. She adapts to social life with her friends and family relatively quickly and is never urged to talk to a psychiatrist. (hide spoiler)]

Clover drives me insane. He is not ominous. He is not terrifying. The most disturbing scene in the entire book is when he watches a movie with Summer and softly strokes her hair the entire time, simply because this draws on every woman's fears. It seems like Preston Googled the characteristics of a murderous pyschopath and blandly painted them across Clover's character in broad strokes. Hatred of women, need for control, a strange relationship with his mother. I was never afraid of Clover. I was rarely creeped out by his presence in the novel. Even his violence and murders did not frighten me. They seemed entirely unrealistic (view spoiler)[Stabbing someone in the stomach with a small knife would not kill them right away. (hide spoiler)].

(view spoiler)[The high volume of women he kills also seems incredibly unlikely. Clover murders several women during the few months he held Summer captive, not to mention how often he has to go through Flowers before someone messes up and is killed. He takes them in broad daylight and has dumped them in the same canal for years. (hide spoiler)]

I don't think I've read a book with such poor sentence structure since maybe Twilight. Maybe. The past and present tenses occasionally seem confused from sentence to sentence (even in the first paragraph of the book). The narrative is plain, undescriptive, and awkwardly worded. A brief example of clumsy sentence structure from page 54: "I literally couldn't think of one thing to say. Everything I thought of sounded lame in my head."

(view spoiler)[Lewis being the one to discover that Clover is Summer's kidnapper is entirely implausible. (hide spoiler)]

The mild cliffhanger at the end also does not work. At all. (view spoiler)[If Clover has been convicted for the murder of at least 10 women (8 bodies in the canal, plus Rose and Violet) and the kidnapping of at least 4, he is going to be held in maximum security for the duration of his life, no matter how "good" he is doing in therapy. There will be no chance of escape. There will be no chance of release. Summer believes he is going to try to bring his family back together again... but wouldn't he dispose of her and Poppy since they fought back and betrayed him? For that matter, how would he possibly escape from a maximum security prison or psychiatric ward? But I see the title The Cellar, #1, so I'm going to assume that Clover will escape to bring his family back together again, no matter how implausible that is. (hide spoiler)]