The Haunting of Hill House [suggested by Helen Close]
Four seekers have arrived at the rambling old pile known as Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of psychic phenomena; Theodora, his lovely assistant; Luke, the future inheritor of the estate; and Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman with a dark past. As they begin to cope with horrifying occurrences beyond their control or understanding, they cannot possibly know what lies ahead. For Hill House is gathering its powers – and soon it will choose one of them to make its own. Adapted into a film, The Haunting, starring Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Owen Wilson, The Haunting of Hill House is a powerful work of slow-burning psychological horror. [Product description from Amazon]
The book has a Wikipedia page.
About the Author
Author’s Wikipedia page.
Author’s website.
Shortlisted for this month
This month Helen’s other two suggestions were:
American Psycho
Brett Easton Ellis established a reputation as the enfant terrible of American fiction in the 1980s with his controversial novel Less than Zero, but with the publication of American Psycho he became established as one of the most notorious and reviled novelists currently writing. American Psycho deserves its controversy. The novel opens with a sign scrawled above a New York subway station: “Abandon hope all ye who enter”. So begins a hellish descent into the world of Patrick Bateman, the novel’s protagonist. Bateman is a handsome 26-year-old Wall Street yuppie, who spends his days listening to Whitney Houston and working out which exclusive restaurant to eat in and what clothes to wear in a dizzying parody of 1980s consumerism run mad.
However, Bateman also has a darker side; he is a psychopathic serial killer, with a penchant for torturing and sexually abusing young women before killing them in the most gruesome and explicit fashion. The novel contains little actual plot, and consists of extended descriptions of exclusive restaurants, designer clothes, TV shows and the minutiae of Bateman’s vacuous world, relieved only by clinically described scenes of torture and mutilation which are not for the faint-hearted. Bateman makes little attempt to justify his actions, merely claiming that “this is the way the world–my world–moves”. As a satire on the bankrupt, money-driven world of the 1980s, American Psycho is a successful, if rather heavy-handed piece of fiction, whose controversy seems only set to increase. –Jerry Brotton [writing on Amazon].
The book has a Wikipedia page and has also been made into a film which has its own Wikipedia page.
About the Author
Author’s Wikipedia page.
Author’s website.
The Call of Cthulhu
One of the feature stories of the Cthulhu Mythos, H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘the Call of Cthulhu’ is a harrowing tale of the weakness of the human mind when confronted by powers and intelligences from beyond our world. [Product description from Amazon.com]
The book has a Wikipedia page and has also been made into a film.
About the Author