Don’t look a gift house in the mouth, except maybe you should if the house in question is a cursed witch-house. Maynard of the title gives his house to a Vietnam army buddy Austin and promptly dies. Back in the good old US of A, Austin has nowhere to go so he travels through snow and cold and Maine dialects to his inherited house and settles in, despite the creepy witch’s tree outside and a guestbook of sorts on the wall spelling out that the house is no good. Soon a rocking chair’s rocking all by itself, a bear attacks, some kids start messing with him and to top it off he gets chased by a w ..read more

The Dark is a 1980 horror novel by James Herbert, where a sentient darkness is making people violently insane. By 1980 Herbert was starting to turn away from the fast-paced style of The Rats and The Fog that made his career. His following works would display a more experienced writer, and while The Dark is a step out of the past, it also still contains all those trademark vignettes where a character is introduced only to be killed a paragraph or two later.  One night strange killings are taking place on Willow Road. A girl sets her house on fire, a nurse strangles a patient with her hair ..read more

Adventureland is a 1990 debut horror novel by British author Steve Harris (1954-2016) who would go on to publish 7 hefty novels during the decade. It starts as young Tommy Cousins goes missing without a trace at a funfair. He’s never found, and eventually the fair continues on to the next town, real-life Basingstoke, where 19-year-old Dave Carter is hanging out with his girlfriend Sally and his mates while dodging Roddy the violent bully and his cronies.  Dave witnesses several strange and unsettling events, in retrospect heralding the arrival of the carnival in town. The group visits th ..read more

Back in 1978 Stephen King was an author with a couple of bestsellers under his belt and things were seemingly getting bigger with each book. So for his fifth act, he chose to wrote about the Patty Hearst kidnapping. That didn’t pan out, so after a while he switched gears and started writing The Stand. Things got bigger alright, with the original manuscript clocking in at 1200 pages. The publishers requested that a third should be culled, and so it was. Until 1990, when the full uncut (and slightly updated) version saw the light of day.  The Stand is a good vs. evil epic against an apocaly ..read more

Sarah is a teenager with a guardian angel, a personal ghost whose modus operandi is to kill anyone who displeases Sarah. Having accidentally gotten her cat and her little brother killed this way, Sarah is understandably beginning to feel some remorse. Then her mother gets brutally raped and killed by a stranger, which Sarah witnesses from a distance. In this situation the ghost, Tully, proves mostly useless, although he does later dispatch her new (pregnant) stepmother, establishing that he only attacks those who are easy prey. The mechanisms behind this old world ghost are decidedly murky. A ..read more

Chandal and Justin are a young couple living in Manhattan when they receive an irresistible offer to move into one of New York’s elegant and desirable apartment buildings. Grabbing the deal of a lifetime they move in, but soon Chandal begins seeing ghosts while Justin becomes increasingly strange and secretive. Turns out the two elderly sisters who own the brownstone are actually demon-worshipping cultists who want the couple for their own nefarious ends.  The story goes that Ken Eulo read the Amityville Horror and thought he could do something similar in his sleep. So he apparently took ..read more

Tom is the all-American golden-haired blue-eyed boy, the class president, the captain of the baseball team, loved by everyone. But lately the 17-year-old has seemed to be a little off, as if he’s been preoccupied with something. Girl trouble? No, it turns out he’s been contacted by a purple-haired alien god called SOLA, who has commanded Tom to kill his family on December 22nd. It is now December 18th. The countdown begins, and we meet the Nash family: Cole the forty-something father, who is a closed-up bundle of problems, a sort of a Mr. Darcy in the Pennsylvania suburbs. Anne the mom is havi ..read more

Helen is the new raven-haired student at a prestigious private college for rich kids and everyone has the hots for her. Soon she attends a Satanic ritual the other students are having for, you know, shits and giggles. The ritual fails, Satan doesn’t appear, but Helen suddenly goes berserk and tries to bite a fellow student. She soon recovers, but begins exhibiting strange behaviour, being even more promiscious than before. Nothing like an occult ritual to make you lust for sex. Later, one by one, she seduces and copulates with every man who was present at the ritual, all of whom end up dead in ..read more

Simon the Exorcist has failed at his job, his faith has deserted him, and his wife has left him for someone wealthier and taken the kids, who now call their mom’s new man their “daddy”. It’s also raining, because this is Britain. A short trip to rural Wales seems just the ticket to get his life on track. Together with Andrea the new female companion Simon makes his way to Cwmgilla, where an old mine has been turned into an underground tourist attraction. During a guided tour Simon hears an ill wind and senses an evil presence deep in the caverns. Is it ghosts? Satan? Maggie Thatcher? In any ca ..read more

Night Shift is Stephen King’s first short story collection, with stories originally published between 1968 and 1977. Spanning such a long length of time during a period when King was growing up as an author in leaps and bounds, it’s not a surprise that the collection is a hodgepodge of ideas and approaches, with King trying out different styles, both borrowing heavily from classics as well as starting to discover his own path.  Some of the twenty stories share similarities, most notably several stories feature inanimate objects coming to life and many contain occult things, as in grimoir ..read more