Nazereth Hill

This one took a while for me to get into, I almost stopped at fifty pages where nothing had happened yet but a truly boring tenants meeting However, the setting of modern Northern England as written by a British writer had an inherent fascination for me.

Nazareth Hill is where witches once danced and where an insane asylum once housed them after witch hunts went out of fashion--and there are strange happenings going on there--ones witnessed by several people, particularly a fifteen year old girl, Amy Priestly. She's a typical teenager, in ways I could imagine being maddening if I were her parent: body piercings, shaved head, plays loud music, smokes marijuana, pigsty of a room, sullen and uncommunicative; her father has good reason for concern.

Yet the core of the horror of this book is how easily isolated and vulnerable Amy is, to his authority as a parent since she's not yet of age, as he becomes increasingly controlling and prey to a zealous religious mindset that may be influenced by the dark forces surrounding them. The tension between them and suspense becomes more and more unbearable to take as a reader, especially in those last hundred pages. Particularly, as with the reviewer below, I do find frustrating the kind of story where no one believes the protagonist.

This was well-written, literate, with characters that felt all too real--although be warned, it's also brutal and heartbreaking. ( )

While I know Campbell is an excellent author, this book didn't appeal to me as strongly as I thought it would. Yes, it is a haunted house book, but it was easy to see where the plot was going to end up. Most of the problem for me is that he did such a great job making most of the characters so unlikable that I didn't want to see the main character, Amy, have to put up with such icky people. It's a good novel, it just wasn't for me. If you hate it when people don't believe a character, this might not be the best Ramsey Campbell book for you to choose! :-) ( )