Review of "The Violin's Curse" by Lydia Laga

Score: 91/100 (9.1 out of 10)

The Violin’s Curse by Lydia Laga is a short yet slow-burning supernatural mystery that fuses gothic horror with a personal journey of grief, legacy, and self-discovery.

The story centers on Olivia Hart, a reserved violinist whose world is upended after she encounters a haunted violin in a dusty antique shop owned by Theo Callahan. The instrument awakens eerie visions, mysterious music, and a path to uncovering the truth about her father’s disappearance, a demonic curse, and an ancient gateway to Hell itself.

Legends tell of a magical, mystical, and powerful enchanted violin with strings crafted by the devil himself. It is said to manipulate and corrupt all who possess it, similar to the One Ring. And, similar to the One Ring, it grants (or promises to grant) the wielder with unspeakable power.

In Olivia’s hands, this violin becomes more than an instrument—it becomes a key, a vessel through which ancient secrets, buried memories, and haunting truths are unearthed. As she follows a trail of cryptic melodies and spectral visions across Europe, Olivia is drawn deeper into a centuries-old curse tied to her bloodline. The more she plays, the more the line blurs between her own thoughts and the will of the violin, forcing her to confront the price of obsession, the pull of legacy, and the terrifying possibility that completing the melody may unleash something the world is not ready to face.

This isn't the first time we've dealt with a magic or accursed instrument (or musical composition) in our contests. The Devil Pulls the Strings by J.W. Zarek employs essentially the same idea, and this is also a major plot device in Kindred of the Unseen by Micah Beardsley. However, we think the accursed instrument itself was given a lot more specific attention and focus in this book than in these other examples (which seemed more interested in other things).

You could kinda compare it to the teapot in The Brass Teapot--this object that—like the One Ring—calls out to people and gradually corrupts them.

Actually, the best comparison we have is the titular portrait in The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. That might seem like the strangest of these comparisons, but hear us out. In Dorian Gray, the portrait ages and decays with every sin Dorian commits, while he remains young and untouched—his guilt and darkness hidden away in a frame. In The Violin’s Curse, Olivia’s haunted instrument works in a similar way. The more she plays it, the more it draws out her memories, grief, and obsessions, almost like the violin is feeding on her emotions and leading her toward something darker. Both Dorian and Olivia are tempted by something beautiful—Dorian by eternal youth, Olivia by music that seems to connect her to her lost father—and in both cases, that beauty hides something deeply unnatural. Think of it like Dr. Frankenstein wanting to cheat death—it seems virtuous on the surface, but it's wholly unnatural. As the story goes on, Olivia begins to lose trust in others, in her own mind, and even in the music itself. Like Dorian, she’s caught in a slow descent, not through flashy horror, but through quiet, creeping dread. You can see aspects that reflect addiction and a downward spiral in both characters (Dorian and Olivia).

Speaking of comparisons and similarities, this isn't the only character named Olivia Hart to come through our contests either. Olivia Hart was a central character in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: The Return by Amy Jo Johnson & Matt Hotson, the daughter of Kimberly Hart (the Pink Ranger) and Tommy Oliver (the Green/White Ranger). So, it's kinda funny reading these works of fiction back-to-back. It almost seems and feels intertextual in a meta sense. Like, imagine if this descendant of heroic Power Rangers actually gained possession of an evil object like this violin, thus leading to her heel-turn. It's a funny and interesting thought.

This book is conceptually very good. However, it has some glaring issues.
First and foremost, the formatting was a nightmare for us to deal with. NOTE: The following issues don't seem to have been an issue with the Kindle version, just the PDF we were sent. There were symbols and missing letters in the version we got, which was frustrating. We think this was caused by the author or editor's need to add violin pictures and large stylized letters at the beginning of chapters, throwing off the font and causing conversion problems in different PDF readers (we tried Adobe Acrobat & Sumatra PDF with mixed and varied results). Ultimately, we invested $100 or so to get an OCR (optical character recognition) software just to convert this into something readable. In all fairness, other books have similar issues (though rarely). Maybe this is an issue with Vellum or authors/editors getting too fancy and cute? Please don't overformat and overstylize your text. Just present the text. Your characters and plots will speak for themselves. Please, for the love of God.

Another issue with this book is that it kinda seems unfinished. It's quite sparse (less than 200 pages) and seems to end almost as soon as it picks up (when it becomes exciting). Maybe this is building to a sequel or a full-blown series? After all, magical objects have a way of reemerging and inserting themselves into new or continuing plotlines.

So, if you're up for a novella-length fantasy mystery story, check this out on Amazon!