By Jim Mcleod 
“The Place Where They Buried Your Heart” is an ode to all facets of a haunted house tale. It’s unsettling, original, and packed with real emotional teeth. It proves that the most terrifying stories aren’t just about what goes bump in the night, but about the people who choose to face that darkness, armed with nothing but their love and their refusal to be devoured.
The Place Where They Buried Your Heart by Christina Henry Review: A Haunted House to End Haunted Houses!
Every street has its story. A memory soaked into the pavement, a ghost in the gutters. On an otherwise ordinary street in Chicago, the story is the house. The old McIntyre place. Abandoned. Hungry. For the children on the block, it’s a dare. For their parents, a warning. For Jessie Campanelli, it’s the place that ate her little brother Paul, the darkness that shattered her family, and the malevolent presence she must face as an adult, a mother, living in the shadow of a past that never stopped breathing down her neck.
This is Christina Henry’s The Place Where They Buried Your Heart. And it’s a masterclass in haunted house horror.
Henry, no stranger to the genre after The House That Horror Built, does something spectacular here. She takes the classic haunted house trope and twists it, layering it and building it into something far more complex and terrifying. This isn’t just a story about a creepy building; it’s a story about a haunted neighbourhood, a haunted legacy. The evil in the McIntyre house doesn’t stay put. It spreads. A darkness that is alive, alive and hungry, seeping out from its foundations and affecting everyone on the block. The book becomes a gripping examination of how the past can haunt an entire community across generations.
The setup is brutally simple, every sibling’s worst nightmare brought to life. Jessie, thirteen and grounded, dares her eight-year-old brother Paul to go inside the house. He goes in. He doesn’t come out. His friends say the house ate him. The adults, of course, don’t believe it. They think in terms of kidnappers and mundane tragedies. They cannot comprehend the supernatural hunger they are dealing with. This single event fractures Jessie’s family irrevocably. The guilt becomes her constant companion, a chain that binds her to that street, to that house, for decades.
Henry’s characterisation is, as always, superb. Jessie is a phenomenal protagonist, a character study in grief, guilt, and resilience. We follow her from the traumatic day of Paul’s disappearance into her adulthood. She grows up, has a child of her own, and remains on the same street—a sentinel keeping watch over the monster that took her brother. She isn’t just living her life; she’s standing guard. This choice speaks volumes about her character, a mix of self-imposed punishment and fierce, protective instinct. She is broken, but she is not defeated. The house may have buried her heart, but it didn’t manage to kill it.
The house itself is a character, perhaps the most static one, yet the most powerfully threatening. It’s not just a setting; it’s an antagonist. It crouches. It waits. It has a voice that calls for help from behind locked doors, a familiar trick that Henry employs to chilling effect. The horror is visceral, shifting stairs, doors that won’t open, walls that bite. Workers sent to bulldoze the place run away in terror . The house fights back. It consumes. And with every life it takes, its power grows.
What makes the novel so compelling is the way Henry balances genuine, eerie thrills with profound emotional depth. This is a cosmic blast of haunted house horror, but it’s also a story about the ferocity of love and the improbable ways it can capture our hearts.
The narrative explores the complex bonds of families—both the ones we lose and the ones we gain. Jessie’s relationship with her grandparents, her own role as a mother, and her connection to the other neighbours who have witnessed the house’s horrors are all rendered with a tenderness that contrasts sharply with the surrounding terror. The book argues that holding tight to your hope and faith can be a shield against the looming monsters, both real and supernatural.
The themes are rich and resonant. It’s about the feeling of being stuck, of being unable to escape the geography of your own trauma. For Jessie and her neighbours, the horror is not just the house; it’s the entire street, a place they feel they can never leave. It’s a story about grief and how it can shape a life, a family, a community. Henry layers childhood nostalgia with genuine chills, creating a read that is as moving as it is terrifying.
The supporting cast adds tremendous weight. A stranger arrives, a man who knows Jessie’s history and the true nature of the house. His appearance offers the first real insight into the evil they face and shifts the story from a passive watch to an active confrontation . The group of neighbours who have witnessed the tragedies become a band of unlikely heroes. They refuse to run. They are witnesses and sentinels, waiting for their chance to fight back. Their loyalty and shared burden make the stakes feel incredibly high. This isn’t just one woman’s fight; it’s a community’s last stand.
Christina Henry writes the kind of horror that gets under your skin because it’s rooted in human emotion. The haunted house is a metaphor for the unresolved trauma that consumes us, for the guilt that eats away at a person from the inside. The story is a page-turner, a book you’ll want to slam shut one moment, while desperately turning the pages the next. It’s the perfect level of scare, plus heart and intellect.
“The Place Where They Buried Your Heart” is an ode to all facets of a haunted house tale. It’s unsettling, original, and packed with real emotional teeth. It proves that the most terrifying stories aren’t just about what goes bump in the night, but about the people who choose to face that darkness, armed with nothing but their love and their refusal to be devoured.
The Place Where They Buried Your Heart by Christina Henry
A woman must confront the evil that has been terrorizing her street since she was a child in this gripping haunted house novel, perfect for fans of The Last House on Needless Street and Tell Me I’m Worthless.
On an otherwise ordinary street in Chicago, there is a house. An abandoned house where, once upon a time, terrible things happened. The children who live on this block are told by their parents to stay away from that house. But of course, children don’t listen. Children think it’s fun to be scared, to dare each other to go inside.
Jessie Campanelli did what many older sisters do and dared her little brother Paul. But unlike all the other kids who went inside that abandoned house, Paul didn’t return. His two friends, Jake and Richie, said that the house ate Paul. Of course adults didn’t believe that. Adults never believe what kids say. They thought someone kidnapped Paul, or otherwise hurt him. They thought Paul had disappeared in a way that was ordinary, explainable.
The disappearance of her little brother broke Jessie’s family apart in ways that would never be repaired. Jessie grew up, had a child of her own, kept living on the same street where the house that ate her brother sat, crouched and waiting. And darkness seemed to spread out from that house, a darkness that was alive—alive and hungry.
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Cat Treadwell