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.

Slade House, by David Mitchell. Random House, 2015

"Slade House” is a haunted house story- except the house is not really haunted. The story spans 36 years, from October 1979 to October 2015. On each of the nine year anniversaries, a new but connected story ensues as a new person walks into the trap. Each new person learns more about what is going on, until at the last we are given a whole explanation. The story is tied to the author’s recent “The Bone Clocks”, but I had no trouble figuring out how this particular fantasy wor

The entrance to Slade House is a small black iron door in an alley that only is visible every 9 years. Like a TARDIS, the Victorian house and grounds are bigger on the inside than the outside- there is no way it could fit within the current street lay-out. Like fairy land or the Greek underworld, if the victim eats or drinks anything they are doomed to stay there. It’s a very tense and frightening story; the victim- and the reader- has no way of knowing what is real and what isn’t. It’s short; a novella rather than a full sized book, so things happen quickly. And the ending leaves the reader hanging and wanting more. 

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