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    House of Windows
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    House of Windows
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    House of Windows
    Ebook506 pages9 hours

    House of Windows

    By John Langan

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Reissued with a new introduction by Adam Nevill and including a Reading Group Guide, House of Windows is a masterpiece haunted house story by rising star in Horror John Langan.

    “Think Henry James and Joyce Carol Oates with just a few paragraphs of Joe Lansdale…” —Tor.com

    “John Langan is a writer of superb literary horror. Both House of Windows and The Fisherman are dark and unsettling contemporary masterpieces.” —Peter Straub, New York Times bestselling author

    For the last few years, Veronica Croydon has been at the center of scandal, first as the younger woman for whom her famous professor left his wife, and then as his apparent widow. When a writer staying at the same vacation home as Veronica has the chance to hear her story, he jumps at it. What follows takes him to the dark heart of a father's troubled relationship with his only son, in a story that stretches from a college town in the Hudson Valley to the battlefields on Afghanistan, from post-9/11 America to the height of Victorian England. It is a story that leads inexorably to the Belvedere House, the home Veronica shares with her husband, within whose walls a father's terrible words to his son echo and gain in awful force.

    House of Windows is a tense, frightening exploration of a marriage under strain from forces both psychological and supernatural, and it is a meditation on the ways loss haunts every one of us.

    “House of Windows is a haunted house story of the highest order.” —Strange Horizons

    Reading Group Guide Inside
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDiversion Books
    Release dateJul 11, 2017
    ISBN9781682308110
    Unavailable
    House of Windows
    Author

    John Langan

    John Langan is the author of two novels and five collections of stories. For his work, he has received the Bram Stoker and This Is Horror Awards. He is one of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Awards. He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with his family and certainly not too many books.  

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    Reviews for House of Windows

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    • 4/5
      House of Windows by John Langan is a bit of an anomaly for me, a foray into the world of literary horror. I tend to lean toward books written in the vernacular of the common people, like myself. And then I go and use a word like vernacular, seems John's work is already having an effect on me. House of Windows is a story told by Veronica Croyden and is mostly about the events leading to her husband's disappearance. It's a ghost story, of sorts. Or at least a haunting since you could say both Veronica and her much older husband are haunted by the death of Roger's son from a former marriage.Central to the tale is the Belvedere House name for a minor painter who had summered there half a century ago."We bought the house for a song and a fairly cheap tune at that."Along the way, Langan provides occasional insight into the human condition. I particularly liked his take on being a teenager..."When you're a teenager—or at least, when I was, the last thing I wanted was for my parents to identify with me. I wanted them to respect who I was, which was, of course, completely different from either of them, let me do what I wanted to, and provide food, shelter, and cash as needed. Neither of them lived up to that ideal—not even close. What it boiled down to was, Dad was slightly less annoying than Mom."There were times I found myself asking, "Do I really care about any of these characters?" But, I just couldn't pull away from the drama.House of Windows was John Langan's first novel and it had a hard time finding a home. The genre people weren't happy with all the literary stuff, and the literary people weren't happy with the genre stuff.I am glad the story found a home which made it easier to get John's next work published, the critically acclaimed novel, The Fisherman.Recommended.Originally published in 2009, House of Windows, found a new home with Diversion Books in 2017 and is currently available in hardcover, paperback, and e-book formats.From the author's bio - John Langan is the author of two novels, The Fisherman (Word Horde 2016) and House of Windows (Night Shade 2009/Diversion 2017), and two collections of stories, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (Hippocampus 2013) and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime 2008). The Fisherman won the Bram Stoker and This Is Horror Awards for superior achievement in a novel in 2016. He's one of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Awards, for which he served as a juror during its first three years. Currently, he reviews horror and dark fantasy for Locus magazine. In 2018, his next collection, Sefira, and Other Betrayals, will be published by Hippocampus Press.
    • 5/5
      If Jane Eyre were a horror novel, or Poe were transmitted into this century, or Lovecraft attempted his own version of a novel-length domestic drama...well, you might end up with this strange strange ride of a novel.In the tradition of Poe and Lovecraft, Langan's novel is a beautifully crafted work of the supernatural. His meshing of literary awareness and technique with some use of conventions of horror does take some getting used to, but the result is fairly entrancing. This can't simply be called a haunted house story, a ghost story, or even just a work of horror--it is all of these things, and clearly descended from authors such as Poe, Lovecraft, Hodgson (his House on the Borderland especially), and even Dickens. In many ways, it feels like a much older work, made contemporary only because of the brief mentions of technology and its relation to the Iraq War, and readers of the authors I've just mentioned will feel strangely familiar with what Langan has created.All this said, the writer's style and the fragmented nature of the narrative do take some getting used to, and I'm not entirely convinced that a few more scenes were needed to fill in some holes which might have made for a smoother read. Because of this, readers who are used to breezing through horror may be frustrated early on--this is a horror version of a Victorian novel made contemporary, truly enough, with a few too many references to literary knowledge along the way.Still, on the whole, I'm so glad that I powered my way through the beginning...once I was a few short sections in, I couldn't have stopped reading this book if I'd wanted to.Recommended, especially to lovers of Poe, Hodgson, and Lovecraft.