Here’s a quick overview of what I’m looking at, reading, watching, drinking, thinking, selling, promoting, procuring, etc. etc. this week. If you care.

READING: Do you ever get your hands on what you think will be a good ghost/ horror story and want to be alone with it, underneath a blanket? You think, “I want to so scared I’m afraid to go to the bathroom by myself.” So you sit in the house, alone, with no sound on (TV, radio, dishwasher, clothes washer, etc.) and read?

That’s what I was hoping for with The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian, which a lot of people/reviews liked. Here’s an overview of the plot: a pilot crash lands a plane in a river and almost all the passengers die. He retires from being a pilot and moves his family (wife and twin daughters) to New Hampshire, to an old Victorian house with a disturbing past, so he can brood. There is a door in the basement that seems to go nowhere, only he can’t verify that because it’s nailed shut with 39 carriage bolts. That’s exactly the number of people who died on the plane!

Oh, all the horror constructs are there, people:

• Victorian house with an icky past
• Twins
• Traumatic event
• Detail that may or may not have any significance (39 bolts)

I started reading. Plane crash. Move to house. Uh oh, a 12-year-old boy named Sawyer Dunmore committed suicide in the house a long time ago and he was a twin! Uh oh, the new family is having bad dreams.

Continue reading The Weekly Round-Up: Horror Stories Not Horrifying Enough →