Going into a story with this kind of expectation is not necessarily a good thing, and I believe I fell prey to this same mindset while reading Sundial. I believe people began to view him as 'the plot twist' director, where you go see his movies to experience a crazy twist. Sure he had a few more great hits like Signs or Unbreakable, but eventually things seemed to fall apart and some of his movies were reviewed very poorly. Anybody that follows movies knows that Shyamalan's career took a bit of a nosedive eventually after The Sixth Sense. Both are brilliant works by storytellers who hadn't put out much other material yet.Īnd so onto my next point. I imagine I would enjoy a re-read just because the whole story takes on new meanings with this twist in mind. Similarly, The Last House on Needless Street is a wonderful book but mostly the enjoyment of it revolves around the epic revelations we are given near the end. The Sixth Sense is an excellent movie with a brilliant twist that I still find enjoyable to engage with even on a re-watch. I don't know if that's necessarily an official term that's ever been brought up elsewhere, but the main idea is that we have a storyteller who hit BIG with one of their early works and a lot of that is because of a plot twist. I felt like the story built up to something that didn't quite land for me as all that surprising or shocking.īut then I started to realize that these may be unfair expectations, and this is why I've brought up the 'M.

But I found myself wanting so much more from the story, I was expecting to be absolutely floored by the reveals of what was actually going on in Sundial and what Rob was going to do next. I would probably recommend it to people who read a lot of books as an acceptable, quick read. And in the end I found myself incredibly.whelmed? I waited a few days to let it simmer in my head for a while before drawing conclusions on how I felt about it. I eagerly bought her next novel, Sundial and just finished it a few days ago. It felt like a spark of genius, the kind of success that can propel an author to mainstream territory (at least among horrorlit nerds). I read The Last House on Needless Street recently, and like just about everyone else who's experienced that novel I found it to be really excellent and incredibly engaging with multiple brilliant twists.

Sundial book ward