Saturday, February 9, 2019

Magdalena’s Ghost: The Haunting of the House in Gallows Lane, by Peppi Hilton. 2015







Young couple Lucy and Anton are headed out for a weekend of camping in their van when Anton decides to take a new road to the campground. They find themselves in a run-down village, and he is taken with an old, abandoned house. Lucy finds the house horribly creepy and unwelcoming, but Anton develops an immediate obsession with it. Suddenly he’s got their lives mapped out as B&B owners in the middle of nowhere. Despite Lucy’s objections, Anton pushes it and they are owners of the decrepit building in no time. He’s a carpenter, and so able to do the repairs and restorations himself- no one else is coming and going into the house. Lucy hates the house despite its beauty, and finds creepy things happening. When Anton leaves for two weeks to work on a customer’s house, things really break loose. The grand piano plays, doors open and close, and there are, quite literally, skeletons in the closet. The past is coming alive, with a vengeance. The story plays out in both the present and the 1950s.



While the haunting was interesting and pretty well done- some of it was very creepy!, I wasn’t crazy about aspects of the story. Anton came across as not caring a bit about what Lucy thought, and just did as he pleased. Lucy was a very weak character, going along with the flow, being unwilling to cross Anton. There was also a good deal of repetition. I’d say four stars.


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