“Apartment Five Is Alive” is a group of six related chapters (plus an interlude) involving tenants of a specific apartment in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Chapter One traces its beginnings as a (big) room in a 1920s house, and the other five occur after the house has been converted to apartments, with people inhabiting the place in the 1950s, 1970s to 1990s, and early 2000s, some for very short periods and some much longer. One tenant, a window dresser by profession, starts the tradition of hosting a Halloween party each year, which involves brilliant hand-made decorations and throngs of costumed party-goers. What he doesn’t know is that the apartment is, in some sense, sentient - and when his parties stop, It (the apartment) is desperate to recreate those days…. The premise of this novel is quite clever; unfortunately, the execution is not. I didn’t much care for any of the characters, and the apartment itself seemed to be sometimes able to cause all sorts of mayhem and at other times not so much. In addition, there’s a massive amount of grammatical problems here; I know that can be intended in some books, but here it is much too inconsistent to be deliberate. Half-rendered sentences here, complete run-on sentences there, the occasional bit where it seems the author was sketching out an image and then repeats it more ornately a paragraph later - it’s just a mess. I read it all because of the intriguing premise (and because it’s short), but it really wasn’t worth my time. ( )