You Did Nothing Wrong Review

Special thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the ARC copy they provided.

Ummm… excuse me?? I was lured here with promises of haunted houses and toothy things in the walls, waiting to slink out and have a bite, and what do I find?? A physiological minefield, where no one is innocent and nothing, not even the creepy house, is what it seems.

Like another reviewer said, everyone did everything wrong.

EvErYtHiNg.

Except, quite literally, the child, who in no way deserved the house of horrors he was treated to.

But let’s back up.

I’ve read a lot of CG Drews’ books and I went into You Did Nothing Wrong expecting the monsters to be real and the house to be alive. To put it clearly, I expected to read a typical haunted house trope with a backdrop of hideous characters who deserved to be devoured by a human eating house.

This was not what Drews served and I couldn’t be happier about it.

Oh, for sure the house is creepy and full of rot and poisonous death, but whether or not it’s full of ghosts is up for debate and I read the book. I still don’t know. But if I had to guess, I would say what one incredibly messed up character told the other incredibly messed up character is probably true: “There is nothing haunting this house!” <gender redacted> roars. “The haunting is you, <name redacted> fucking <name redacted>. The haunting has always been you.”

I believe at its heart You Did Nothing Wrong is a book about people. Because we are our own monsters. We are the terrors that haunt us at night and we are the ghosts in the walls.

Or we create them. We make our own monsters, one way or another, and Drews writes this fact beautifully. You Did Nothing Wrong weaves twisted threads over one another and turns back on itself, unraveling its secrets one at a time. Like the rot in the walls, this book creeps up on you, and once you breathe it in, there’s no way to get its spores out of you.

So come in, come in. Dive into Drews’ deadly delicious prose, beware of the holes in the walls, and remember… you did nothing wrong.