Scary & Freaky stories: The Paranormal World

*BONUS EPISODE* TOP 10 GHOST STORIES TO TELL ON LONG NIGHTS

3. Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1973). The Rolfes - Ben, wife Marian, son David, and Aunt Elizabeth - are a pleasant family from New York seeking to escape from the doldrums of a summer in their Queens apartment. They find a beautiful old country mansion on Long Island - restful, secluded, with pool and private beach - perfect, for the right people. But their "perfect" summer home hides terrors beyond their wildest imaginings. During that long summer the house becomes a nightmare from which there seems to be no escape. For all those folks who have at times felt that their home and possessions owned them, rather than the other way around; for those folks who love a good haunted house/possession tale; and even for those readers who simply enjoy a well-told thriller of a pageturner, Robert Marasco's 1973 novel Burnt Offeringswill be a real find. This was Marasco's first novel in a sadly unprolific career; he came out with only two more titles - Child's Play, a drama, in 1970, and Parlor Games, a Gothic-style mystery, in 1979 - before succumbing to lung cancer in 1998, at the age of 62. A real loss, if Burnt Offerings is any indication of the man's skills. In this work, we meet Ben and Marian Rolfe, a nice, ordinary couple from Queens, who, with 8-year-old son David and elderly Aunt Elizabeth in tow, rent an aging mansion on Long Island's North Fork. This property is let for the unbelievably low price of $900 for the entire summer, with one proviso: the renters' mother will remain in her room for the duration, but will stay out of sight and be quite low maintenance. Marasco then begins to gently turn the screws, and before long, horrible things start to transpire, or do they? Marian becomes obsessed with keeping house, while her hair quickly grays; Ben starts to physically abuse his son uncontrollably and to suffer morbid hallucinations; and Elizabeth, once spry, starts to age at an alarming rate. And that is just the start of this amazing story. Marasco writes extremely well; it is hard for me to believe that this was his first novel. Yes, he is sometimes guilty of the faults of a beginning writer, such as an occasional bit of fuzzy writing and some instances of poor grammar and punctuation (granted, those latter are more the fault of Marasco's editor). But what he excels at is beautifully rendered, realistic dialogue; I've seldom read better. Perhaps I should also mention here that this book was chosen by no less a luminary than Stephen King for inclusion in Stephen Jones and Kim Newman's excellent overview volume Horror: 100 Best Books (which is where I first heard of the book). It is easy to see the influence that Burnt Offerings had on King's similarly themed The Shining, which came out four years later. Although perhaps not as chilling as King's novel, or Shirley Jackson's classic The Haunting of Hill House (but then again, how many books are?), Burnt Offerings can even hold its own in that august company. The folks in Richard Matheson's Hell House go through no greater horrors than the Rolfes do, either. The Rolfes are a sweet couple, and the reader roots for them, and hopes that they come through their ordeals okay. But with the creeping, living forces of the Allardyce mansion ranged against them, the odds are certainly not in their favor! Anyway, let me just say that I more than highly recommend this book to any and all interested readers.

4. Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story by Clive Barker (New York: HarperTorch, 2001). Film's most popular action hero needs a place to heal after surgery that has gone terribly wrong. His fiercely loyal agent finds him just such a place in a luxurious, forgotten mansion high in the Hollywood Hills. But the original owner of the mansion was a beautiful woman devoted to pleasure at any cost, and the terrible legacy of her deed has not yet died. There are ghosts and monsters haunting Coldheart Canyon, where nothing is forbidden. This is only my second foray into the written world of Clive Barker (I read Cabalyears ago, and have seen two or three of theHellraiser movies), but I must say that I was quite impressed. Coldheart Canyon is a ferocious indictment of (and backhanded tribute to) Hollywood Babylon, depicted through Barker's glorious imagination as a nexus of human and inhuman evil where fleshly pursuits corrupt the spirit. It's also one ripping ghost story, spooky and suspenseful, as well as (I understand) a departure for Barker in that here, as never before, the fantastic mingles with the real, kind of. The book takes a long time to get started, the first 150 to 200 pages are dreadfully slow, but once the book finds its pace, it doesn't let up. Barker entices his readers to leap into a fantastical world populated by ghostly beasts that roam the hills of a modern-day Tinseltown. His masterful descriptions of this world and the pathological behavior that occurs within it provide an eerie realism, compelling the reader to venture further. This is, in essence, a 686-page supermarket tabloid, the kind of story that would result if Billy Wilder had made Sunset Boulevard as a German Expressionist silent film, with a healthy dash of Edgar Allan Poe and Nikolai Gogol thrown in for good measure. All this notwithstanding, I think the major flaw of this book is that it is about 200 pages too long. For some reason, Barker can't seem to let go of the story, and drags it on for too long, which results in about four endings past where one would naturally consider the ending to be. I read a number of reviews of Coldheart Canyon online, and the general consensus seemed to be that Coldheart Canyon is a feeble offering when held up against earlier Barker works such as Imajica, The Damnation Game, and Weaveworld. My reaction to that is that if Coldheart Canyon pales in comparison to earlier Barker books, than I can't wait to dig into those.