A haunted Villa, a dysfunctional family, a nasty ghost on a summer vacation results in tensions, possession and a holiday from hell.

• Entertainment factor: ★★★★★
• Originality factor: ★★★★★
• Scare factor: ★★★★☆
• Psychological factor: ★★★★★
• Haunted house factor: ★★★★★
• Possession factor: ★★★★☆
• Dysfunctional family factor: ★★★★★

Diavola is a very well written haunted house story with an original take on the classic genre. With a dysfunctional family at the base of a holiday destined to for wrong, a nasty ghost isn’t very helpful. It’s time Anna faces the ghosts, her family and her life. 

It consists of 296 pages. 

Plot

Anna’s parents Linda and Bob have rented a villa in Tuscany near Montesperso to spend a week during the summer with the whole family. Anna’s sister Nicole is coming with her husband Justin and their two girls Waverly of seven and Mia of six years old. Anna’s twin Benny brings his new boyfriend Christopher and Anna is coming alone without her boyfriend with whom she broke up months ago, which only Benny knows of. 

Anna is the black sheep of the family and has done some things in the past her family never lets go of, whether it was true or not. So Anna reluctantly goes to Italy to meet up with her family in Villa Taccola. Things go exactly as she was expecting but still she wants to make the best of it until there is something wrong with the Villa. Anna feels being watched, has strange dreams and there’s a locked tower they aren’t allowed to open and on top of that the villagers are acting strange around them when they visit Montesperso. 

While tensions rise within the family, the Villa shows its teeth and has bitten down on Anna. However nobody believes her when she tries to warn them, until the day they have to leave in pure panic. When Anna is safely home away from her family and the ghost that haunted the villa, something has followed her home to New York. 

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Short Review

It starts out as a dysfunctional family who not only treats Anna as the black sheep, but also as a scapegoat. Everything that goes wrong or not to their satisfaction, they blame Anna and ignore what actually happened, not even wondering about the truth because it’s easier. Anna is trapped in the role her family gave her. Anna not an ordinary demure woman. She is independent, strong, willful, even a bit selfish ate times, but she also tries to take into account her family’s feelings, even when they don’t deserve it.

I guess it also maybe depends on your own situation whether you’ll sympathize with Anna or not. Anna is not the hero of the story, she has many faults and while her family doesn’t come out as a warming family, it’s written in a way that everybody has flaws and deals with problems their own way. 

The family is all cooped up together in a Villa and it’s no wonder that tensions rise quickly and they don’t even need a ghost for that to stirs things up. The ghost however makes things worse and targets Anna in particular making her even more the black sheep, the one who is crazy who is ruining a perfectly good vacation. She has bad dreams, strange dreams and when they find the key to the tower, things really get messed up. 

The scenes with the ghost are pretty creepy and not your typical ghost, it’s more subtle than that, more vile. It tries to separate Anna from her family, which feels very nasty, but you can’t separate something that didn’t belong in the first place. While Anna does her best to investigate what is happening to her and her family by finding out more about the Villa and the ghost, it feels like she is doing it all in vain. 

Between the tensions and the hauntings we get a good feel of the atmosphere in Tuscany. We visit Montesperso, Siena, and Florence and the atmosphere of Italy is very tangible. It feels like you are right there with them. It really does bing out the holiday vibe.

When the vacation is cut short, the final third of the book is about Anna in New York and how she fares after they left Italy. It turns a haunted house story into a possession story, without the full-on possession, but with the infestation stage only, which is probably even more scary. Being under the control of something, knowing it, losing time, without anything she can do about it. We get to learn Anna more in a private setting and maybe even start to wonder if she is as dark as her family claimed her to be, and she starts to wonder herself. This makes the story very intriguing and interesting, getting a psychological look into Anna. And just when we start to think she isn’t a good person, Anna decides it’s time for a big twist, which turns the story into an existential and psychological journey into herself. 

Diavola is an entertaining story with a strong writing style, that has beautiful prose, strong observations, intriguing psychological insights and of course a narrative that will give you enough scares and an uncanny feeling. In the end it’s a good-for-her story that survived fragile relationships that won’t go well on a vacation in a haunted house with a nasty ghost.