Episode Thirteen by Craig DiLouie
Episode Thirteen
by Craig DiLouie
Horror | Mystery | Fiction (Mixed-Media)
464 Pages
Released January 2023
Rating: ★★★
Goodreads
Content Warnings
Blair Witch Project meets Ghost Hunters the TV show, except this one gets really…weird.
This book follows a cast of five characters through mixed media - journal entries, video transcripts, text messages, etc - as they record their highly anticipated thirteenth episode of their ghost hunting series. The story takes place in a place called Foundation House, a supposedly highly haunted house where a bunch of scientific researchers disappeared in the 1970s.
As mentioned, this book is written in mixed media format, which means instead of your usual first or third person narrative the book is written in the form of journal entries, transcribed videos, e-mails, and text messages. We follow 5 different characters - A husband and wife team (the lead investigators), Kevin and Jake (responsible for ghost hunting gadgets and video recording), and recent addition Jessica, a paid actress.
Foundation House is the team’s dream location. No one has lived inside the house since a team of researchers disappeared from it in the 1970s. The book starts off slow but picks up pace after an argument breaks out amongst the team over a possible hoax incident perpetrated by one of the team members. From there, the book goes from predictable to just plain strange. I’m going to somewhat out my age here, but it reminded me of an episode of the late 90s/early 2000’s TV show called So Weird (I’ll say which one in the spoiler section below). The mixed media makes this a quite quick read despite its 400ish page count but I did find myself re-reading certain parts trying to wrap my head around what the author was describing. I feel like this book could have benefitted from a couple more image-related mixed media items instead of being almost completely text-based.
I should also note, this is a horror book, so there are definitely some trigger warnings that you may want to check out before picking this one up.
I can’t decided if I liked this or not. Ultimately, I’m leaning toward liked.