Audrey's Door

If you have not read "The Haunting Of Hill House," just calmly stop everything you are doing (including reading yours truly) and go read it. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Back? Good you can join the rest of us then. Now "Audrey's Door," is a haunted house novel that could be the daughter of "The Haunting of Hill House." Both are able a woman of dubious stability who just want to escape. Unfortunately they escape to a bad place. It might be haunted, it might not, but what it truly is is wrong.

In Audrey's case she runs to the Breviary. The Breviary is the last remaining example of Chaotic Naturalism which wasn't just architecture but a cult. Within the Breviary still resides the rich, mad, inbred children of the original owns. Those children that have not yet committed suicide that is. The Breviary seems to induce that in its tenents.

Audrey is running from her past. Having lived her life with a mother afflicted with mental illness, she doesn't feel so well either. Pathologically shy and suffering from OCD she tries to make something of herself as architect. It is her passion for architecture that first drew her to the Breviary, well that and criminally cheap rent. But really she is running, not just from her past with her mother but her possible future with the first man to have loved her.

You know a person with OCD shouldn't go into a regular haunted house. It's just too easy. The ghost rearranges your closet ten or twelve times and you'd have a raging psychotic fit. The Breviary as I pointed out is not the normal haunted house, so we are very concerned for our Audrey.

Specially when the house tells her to build a door.

Read this please. It is good, vibrant, sometimes funny, and darkly frightening and unsettling. I liked it very well and will put it on shelf next to Shirley Jackson. I will also seek out other books by Sarah Langan, if they don't seek me first.