The film director Lewis Gilbert (him of James Bond fame no less) later went on to make the film adaptation of `Haunted' in 1995 of the same name. While Robert, Simon and Christina cackle within the flames at his imminent death, Juliet appears and walks through the flames, takes David by the hand and rescues him. Plus, not only does the lack of modern communications technology add to the feeling of suspense ( eg: the nearest phone box is a mile or two away from Edbrook) but the focus on characterisation and psychology means that this story can often feel timelessly frightening too.

He is helped (and hindered) by the mysterious incumbent family at the house - and soon finds himself involved in some very strange and scary experiences, the like of which can't be explained by simple logic. Yes, it is at its scariest when you actually take the time to think about what you’re reading – but it is an absolutely expert melding of the kind of complex, subtle and ominous horror you’d find in something like Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting Of Hill House” and the more intense horror you’d expect from a 1980s horror novel. I normally would not read another book by the author if the first book is only worth three stars, but in reading Herbert's bio, it sounds like his very first book Rats, might have been his best and pretty good by today's standard. All of this subtle thematic stuff really helps to add an underlying feeling of unease and dread to the story that gradually builds up over time and can really catch you by surprise. For further information about your statutory rights, contact your local authority Trading Standards department or consumer advice centre (for example the Citizen's Advice Bureau if you are in the UK).

The sale of customised goods or perishable goods, sealed audio or video recordings, or software, which has been opened. Doyle, the family doctor, whom he had met earlier, only to be told by Juliet's ghost that Doyle also had died years ago. Some readers have been troubled by the fact that the investigator is willing to believe in some paranormal phenomena but not others; I did not find this a problem. Unfortunately for David,he finds out the hard way that there are things in this world,better left unexplored,things that are tangible and can not only hurt the mind but the body. It is a novel about how – like the ghosts that haunt Edbrook – the living can also be “frozen in time” by horrifying life events too.

In the classic horror fashion, he is also very much a “damned” character who feels a deep sense of guilt and self-loathing too.

They dominated the others, the dark-furred ones, who foraged for food and brought it back to the lair. I think the only thing wrong with this book was the pacing at times, it seemed to bounce around the timeline a little too often for me personally. At first I thought the main character a little silly, since he did not believe in the supernatural, but did believe in the paranormal and telepathy. David Ash goes into this investigation as a skeptic,trying to prove that there are plausible explanations for people’s ideas of the paranormal,only unknowingly being a guest by the very specters he has yet to believe.

What I did notice most prominently about it this time around, and what I really enjoy about it in the long run is that it's really quite twisted in a hugely-ironic way, and what the author's done here turns his story into something wholly unexpected. Much later, the author wrote two more novels with David as the central character, so that they form a trilogy. She drives David to the palatial Edbrook House, where Christina's two brothers and the withdrawn Nanny Tess live. There are few things I would like to do less than lie under a cloudy night sky while someone read aloud the more vivid passages of Moon. However, this plot element is rendered even more horrifying than the one in “The Shining” because some elements of it are left to the imagination in a way that you probably won’t fully notice until several minutes after you finish the novel and think about it.

He sees Christina and Simon in the gardens outside, and a mysterious young girl hiding behind a tree and staring at him…. I read The Secret of Crickley Hall this year and I really enjoyed it, so I began this series and I wasn’t disappointed. This is a novel that combines the unsettling atmosphere and subtly creeping psychological horror of something like Shirley Jackson’s “ The Haunting Of Hill House” with the intensity and shocking moments that you’d expect from an especially scary horror movie 🙂 Yes, it’s very different from the type of ultra-gruesome splatterpunk horror fiction that Herbert wrote in the 1970s and early-mid 1980s – but it is considerably scarier!

As a professor at Oxford, he receives a series of urgent entreaties from a Miss Webb, who claims she is being tormented by ghosts, to come and help her. Now, however, when he's been summoned by the eccentric Mariell family to their isolated 16th-century country seat Edbrook to investigate a purported haunting, my shelving this book as supernatural fiction should be a dead giveaway that his worldview is going to undergo some revision. I wasn't aware of his David Ash series of books either (of which this is the first one), and would be interested now in working my way through these.As they walk away from the mansion's ruins, Juliet absolves him of his guilt over her death and departs to the afterlife. The real magic of this novel is that the mystery slowly reveals itself piece by piece, each clue gradually forming a terrifying picture. He was one of our greatest popular novelists, whose books are sold in thirty-three other languages, including Russian and Chinese.