THE NIGHT HOUSE

Dark horror by the renowned Norwegian crime novelist.

In the town of Ballantyne, Richard Elauved is a troubled 14-year-old outcast who bullies his classmates. He coerces Tom into a telephone booth (remember those?) and gets him to call Imu Jonasson, an apparently random person whose name he finds in the phone book. But the phone digs into the poor boy’s flesh and eats him up until all traces disappear. Richard goes to the police but cannot persuade them of the horrible truth—for one thing, they can’t find Jonasson’s name in the book—and they demand to know if Richard drowned Tom in the river. In the first third of the tale, all the main characters are teens. Fifteen years pass, and Richard attends a class reunion. Now he is the author of The Night House, the story they’re in and “the teenage horror novel that had changed my life.” He says he came to the reunion to apologize for having bullied everyone, yet all his fellow alums insist he’d been an okay kid, not the nasty bully he’d portrayed in his famous book. So who’s right? Creepy stuff continues, including death by hanging, blood drooling down a car window, transmogrification into a cockroach—you know, standard horror fare. What adds a level of interest is Richard Hansen, who had invented the surname “Elauved” for a curious reason. Perhaps he has a mental illness, given that events belie perception. What is true, and what is the detritus of his fevered brain? Is this a dream within a dream? Some of the evil comes from a surprising source, who advises young Richard, “If you really want to kill them, you have to do it twice. If you don’t, they come back.”But an ill-fated fiend named Jack has the best line: “We’d actually prefer it if you tried to escape. It’s a well-known fact that adrenaline gives meat a bit of extra flavor.”

Scary fun that won’t cause nightmares—or will it?