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The Haunting of Hill House --by Shirley Jackson	Click for more info
Shirley Jackson\'s The Haunting of Hill House has unnerved readers since its original publication in 1959. A tale of subtle, psychological terror, it has earned its place as one of the significant haunted house stories of the ages. Eleanor Vance has always been a loner--shy, vulnerable, and bitterly resentful of the 11 years she lost while nursing her dying mother. \'She had spent so long alone, with no one to love, that it was difficult for her to talk, even casually, to another person without self-consciousness and an awkward inability to find words.\' Eleanor has always sensed that one day something big would happen, and one day it does. She receives an unusual invitation from Dr. John Montague, a man fascinated by \'supernatural manifestations.\' He organizes a ghost watch, inviting people who have been touched by otherworldly events. A paranormal incident from Eleanor\'s childhood qualifies her to be a part of Montague\'s bizarre study--along with headstrong Theodora, his assistant, and Luke, a well-to-do aristocrat. They meet at Hill House--a notorious estate in New England. Hill House is a foreboding structure of towers, buttresses, Gothic spires, gargoyles, strange angles, and rooms within rooms--a place \'without kindness, never meant to be lived in....\' Although Eleanor\'s initial reaction is to flee, the house has a mesmerizing effect, and she begins to feel a strange kind of bliss that entices her to stay. Eleanor is a magnet for the supernatural--she hears deathly wails, feels terrible chills, and sees ghostly apparitions. Once again she feels isolated and alone--neither Theo nor Luke attract so much eerie company. But the physical horror of Hill House is always subtle; more disturbing is the emotional torment Eleanor endures. Intense, literary, and harrowing, The Haunting of Hill House belongs in the same dark league as Henry James\'s classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw. --Naomi Gesinger, ©Amazon.com

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Matty Groves The Haunted Ballad Series --by Deborah Grabien	Click for more info
Ringan Laine has a prized invitation to perform with his band at the Callowen House Arts Festival and he\'s been asked to bring his longtime lover, actor-producer Penny Wintercraft-Hawkes, along as an honored guest. At the prestigious two-week annual festival, artists not only perform to a handpicked audience, but enjoy every luxury their host has to offer. For Ringan and Penny, it\'s a mixed blessing. The couple has already held two terrifying exorcisms for ghosts whose stories are told in songs, and Callowen House is known to be haunted by the pretty young wife of a seventeenth-century Leight-Arnold. A famous traditional song, "Matty Groves," tells her story, a straightforward one that Miles Leight-Arnold is very proud of. Ringan and Penny decide to attend; after all, this story has no mystery for them to solve. But from the first night it becomes clear that the tragic Lady Susanna is not the only spirit haunting Callowen House. Something else is awake, moving through walls and nightmares, growing stronger as it feeds on Penn\'s sensitivity and on the very fear it creates: Andrew Leight, a man as twisted and violent in death as he was in life. Lord Callowen insists that Ringan and Penny rid Callowen House of the dangerous Leight but leave Lady Susanna\'s ghost untouched. As the pair searches the mansion\'s ancient ledgers, Ringan and Penny begin to suspect that Lady Susanna\'s death was not as simple as the song suggests, and that the truth may expose a four-hundred-year-old lie. The third entry in this series, Matty Groves is another bewitching tale of how mysteries thought dead and buried can still return to threaten the living. --©St. Martin\'s Minotaur

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Frankenstein --by Mary Shelley	Click for more info
Frankenstein, loved by many decades of readers and praised by such eminent literary critics as Harold Bloom, seems hardly to need a recommendation. If you haven\'t read it recently, though, you may not remember the sweeping force of the prose, the grotesque, surreal imagery, and the multilayered doppelgänger themes of Mary Shelley\'s masterpiece. As fantasy writer Jane Yolen writes of this (the reviewer\'s favorite) edition, \'The strong black and whites of the main text [illustrations] are dark and brooding, with unremitting shadows and stark contrasts. But the central conversation with the monster--who owes nothing to the overused movie image...but is rather the novel\'s charnel-house composite--is where [Barry] Moser\'s illustrations show their greatest power...The viewer can all but smell the powerful stench of the monster\'s breath as its words spill out across the page. Strong book-making for one of the world\'s strongest and most remarkable books.\' Includes an illuminating afterword by Joyce Carol Oates. --©Amazon.com

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