Thirteen Storeys (2020) by Jonathan Sims

My Review:

I won’t lie – I thoroughly enjoyed Thirteen Storeys as a whole. I loved each “Stor(e)y” as its own and honestly think this would be a great Shutter or Netflix limited series. There are enough creepy elements in each chapter to hold their own.

Each chapter can be considered its own short story; One can even read 11 of them in any order without compromising the story as a whole. I was fully invested and even had a diagram linking characters and events going for fun.

The ending was not bad, but it did break a little bit of the intrigue, IMO, albeit it remained consistent with previous events and information. The book lost significant points for me in its writing and execution. I gave it 3/10 – Some sentences were tough to follow, and I found myself consistently having to reread paragraphs and sometimes even pages to understand what was going on as it wasn’t always clear what or who was being referenced.

For example, an earlier character completely changed between their chapter and when we met them again in the end. My biggest issue is that a secondary character’s name was changed and alternated many times – sometimes, the author would call them A in one paragraph and go back to calling them B in the next. That took me out of the “zone” quite a bit.

With that said, Thirteen Storeys was still relatively painless to follow, and the author more than made up for it with the atmosphere.

I do hope it becomes a series. I feel it will have tons more appeal in a visual format.

My total rating: 3.86

Until next book, be the hummingbird!