Whoever paid for the headline wasn’t big on explanations.Įveryone has a theory on what it means, but none more than Bobbie Topin, an outcast pre-teen who lives with his senile grandfather on the edge of town. But what could it mean? Well for Lobe it means a $200 cashier’s check, but it also means a mystery for the town. Soul Eater begins when newspaperman Lobe Peters runs a cryptic headline in his daily paper. And yet in classic mid-80s fashion, it still ends up marching to the beat of its own drum. Hill House is admittedly spooky, but is it any spookier than being bullied by your mother and sister and never given your own place in the world? I have no doubt the Amityville house was haunted, but the real-life monster there was a manipulative, abusive man who spun the pain he caused into a supernatural event.ĭana Brookins’ Soul Eater checks the boxes of a classic haunted house book: flawed characters, a run down town, skeptics, believers. The Overlook has ghosts, but Jack wasn’t exactly dealing with his drinking problem in a healthy way. Sure, the house they’re in is filled with ghosts, but the story is really about the character’s inner demons and how they’re confronted with those demons through the haunting. While I’ll probably wrestle with this question for the rest of my life, I think the answer lies in the way the authors focus on character. How do they do it? How do they take the cornerstone of modern comfort and turn it into a compelling horror story that will leave even the most skeptical (me) checking under the bed?

Shirley Jackson, Richard Matheson, Jay Anson, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, the list goes on. Writing is hard enough without tossing in the extra challenge of making an inanimate object terrifying.Īnd yet, a staggering amount of authors have pulled it off.

I’ve always had the utmost respect for haunted house horror writers. In other words, this is the place where we talk about horror fiction from the recent past. It’s Thrift Store Finds time! What’s that, you ask? Picture a family dinner but your parents are skeletons, aunt Shelley worships Satan, and grandma keeps a killer kid named Charles on a leash under the table.

Soul-Eater by Dana Brookins