Julian's House - Softcover

This suspenseful haunted-house tale--praised by the New York Times for its "passages rich with descriptive beauty, complex with philosophical theorizing and seductive with hard (and tantalizing) information"--is a rich elaboration on the premise of parapsychologists trying to document ghost behavior. In this instance the researchers are a recently married (and sexually repressed) young couple who move their high-tech equipment into a Victorian house with the requisite history of bumps in the night. They are prepared to encounter supernatural phenomena, but not at all prepared to examine their own psyches. When the house starts acting as a sounding board for their neurotic conflicts, it's not clear whether actual ghosts are acting as interactive mirrors, or if the house is simply a big Rorschach inkblot for the projections of a troubled marriage. Judith Hawkes unfolds all the chilling complexity of the puzzle, and leaves readers to draw their own conclusions.

Nine families have lived in the Gilfoy house since 1930, but none has lasted for more than a few months. They've all been scared off by the "hauntings"--the cold air blasts, thumping noises, and flickering lights with no apparent natural cause. Married parapsychologists Sally and David Curtiss move into the house and explore the small Massachusetts town that surrounds it to collect empirical data about supernatural happenings. They lose their objectivity--and shake the moorings of their marriage--as they find themselves compelled by tales of forbidden love and accidental death in the Gilfoy household at the turn of the century. The reader gets delightfully sucked in, too--even though the events sound like the standard Stephen King plot at first. First novelist Hawkes builds a credible, compelling story, based on solid research.
- Joyce Smothers, Monmouth Cty. Lib., Manalapan, N.J.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.