The House by the Cemetery by John Everson

It is not helped by the fact that all the characters are very one-dimensional. This blow-by-blow account is tedious to read with the occasional paying customer biting the dust. Even more pages are then squandered with all the paying customers fooling around in the haunted house. Too many pages are wasted with Mike mooning around after Katie with his hammer, his beer and his sexual frustrations. I usually enjoy picking up on horror references, but everything in this novel is so basic and heavy-handily thrown at the reader it grates. A very large body count follows, but it is too little too late for a novel that takes an age for anything to happen and for much of the time I felt I had read this before. After Katie’s arrival, the novel meanders towards opening night, then Halloween and a predictable final girl scenario. As the main ‘evil’ in the house, she is an exceptionally weak central character and would struggle to scare a first-grader. A five-year-old could figure out that Katie is the witch, it is just so obvious and everything goes down-hill from there. Whilst Mike is working alone on the house, a young woman, Katie, appears, and here lies the first major problem with the book. We get all the usual stuff a Texas Chain Saw Massacre room, Hellraiser, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Ringu and so on. Once Mike has fixed all the safety and structural problems in the house, Leo’s team turn all the rooms into horror rooms based around famous films and books.

Hopefully with bags of cash in the bank, the big closing night will be 31st October itself. The new lease holder (Leo) does not intend to live in the premise, instead he turns it into a themed haunted house, which will open a month before Halloween.

The house is built beside an old cemetery and has been empty for many years with everything going to wrack and ruin. New publishers in the horror scene, Flame Tree Press, have impressed me with the quality of their releases thus far, but this cliché-ridden bore-fest falls well short of the high standards they have set themselves.Ī down on his luck carpenter, Mike Kostner, gets a job renovating an old house which is supposed to be haunted by a witch. The horror element lacks no ‘drip, drip’ effect and everything is just so clunkily obvious, it became tiresome very quickly. I do not think this novel has one single twist or major unexpected turn and that’s a significant problem in a supernatural novel. It may have a gruesome climax with an impressive body count, but it lacks scares, atmosphere, and ultimately fails because everything about it from page one to the final sequence is totally predictable and telegraphed.

In a crowded haunted house genre, The House by the Cemetery just does not have enough going on to raise itself from the pack instead it reeks of ‘I’ve read this before’ overfamiliarity.

The House by the Cemetery by John Everson