Showing posts with label hauntings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hauntings. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Haunted Houses












The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life At Rose Red / Joyce Reardon, ed.
In the early part of the twentieth century, an oil baron John Rimbauer and his wife Ellen build an enormous mansion in Seattle against the wishes of the locals who say that building a home on an Indian burial ground is bad luck. Tragedy and haunts follow the lives of those who live inside the house through the decades, particularly that of Ellen Rimbauer, whose diary is rehashed years later by a parapsychologist. (FIC DIARY)














The Good House: A Novel / by Tananarive Due
In a small town in Washington state, the Toussaint home still feels the haunting effects from over a century ago when a powerful voodoo priestess from New Orleans unleashed a horrible spirit over it. Now, years later the woman’s descendants have returned to the town to help rid the house and the town of its deadly curse. (FIC DUE)













The Woman in Black / by Susan Hill
Arthur Kipps, a young solicitor, is summoned to the small English village of Crythin Gifford to organize the estate of the now deceased Alice Drablow only to be received by the townspeople with suspicion and coldness. At the former home of the old woman, Arthur is recurrently confronted by the ghastly apparition of a veiled woman dressed in black amid other terrors. (FIC HILL)












The Cellar / by Richard Laymon
In the town of Malcasa Point, CA is a house known as the Beast House which is said to be haunted. Though off limits at night, daytime tours are conducted which take visitors through every room but the cellar of which no one, not even the tour guides, dare venture. This is Laymon’s first installment of the Beast House chronicles which include The Beast House, The Midnight Tour & Friday Night in the Beast House. (FIC LAYMON)













Gad’s Hall / by Norah Lofts
Gad's Hall, an English country home on the market for the first time in over a century, is purchased by a couple and their three children who are desperate for home with enough space to suit their needs. But when their daughter Jill finds herself experiencing strange feelings about parts of her new property, particularly the empty locked room upstairs, the dream becomes a nightmare. The sequel to this book (actually a prequel) is The Haunting of Gad’s Hall. (FIC LOFTS)












Hell House / by Richard Matheson
Parapsychologist Lionel Barrett, a physicist with an interest in parapsychology and four others including his Barrett's wife Edith are hired by dying millionaire William Reinhardt Deutsch to investigate the possibility of life after death. To do so, they must enter the infamous Belasco House in Maine, regarded as the most haunted house in the world. (FIC MATHESO)

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Heart-Shaped Box / by Joe Hill

Judas "Jude" Coyne lives on a farm in an especially isolated part of upstate New York where to pass the time he collects various macabre paraphenelia. An actual noose from a 19th century hanging, witch confessionals, a cookbook for cannibals, books of spells and many other assorted knick-knacks offer the aging death-metal rocker (a musician successful enough to afford said items) an interesting hobby, and a personal side-item his cult of goth fans seem to like. He doesn't believe in any of it of course. It's just good publicity.

But then he finds something really unique. Nothing in his current collection seems as odd and off-the-wall as his latest discovery--a ghost for sale on the Internet. It's such an odd proposition and a genuinely candid advert that Jude can't help but outbid everyone for the chance to own the ghost of a recently deceased man from Florida. For a thousand dollars, Jude becomes the proud owner of a dead man's suit fitted within a heart-shaped box, delivered only hours after the purchase is made. Jude isn't concerned. He's spent a lifetime coping with a brutally harsh childhood where memories and personal demons of an abusive father, a man he hasn't seen for 20 years who now lies on his deathbed in Louisiana. Also haunting him are the metaphorical ghosts of lovers and old girlfriends he's deliberately hurt and abandoned, of the bandmates he betrayed and the remaining family members he's cut ties with. But what happens when those supposedly 'dead' memories start paying visits?

Stephen King's second son Joe Hill (pen name for Joseph King) has his father's eye for the macabre and his own talent to boot him instantly into the upper echelon of horror fiction writers. Heart-shaped Box is a chilling, intense book reverberating at different levels, taking the reader on a journey of love, hate and despair, subtly displaying how memories can be distorted, burdens can be shared and how, sometimes, the dead really do tell their own tales. What's more, it manages to thread the needle of terror and the paranormal through the reality hole and make what's happening seem perfectly believable. (FIC HILL)