a_chickletz's review
Good lord, this book is a DNF.
So, I was expecting a really interesting haunted house book.
It starts out sorta like Casper. Dad and teenage daughter move into a creepy house with a secret, AND A GHOST. Unfortunately this ghost is not friendly, it's actually horny. It tries to get on with the dad, possession happens, a lot of other crazy shit happens.
I just couldn't get any further.
If you're up for reading a book that reminds you of Casper (there is a lighthouse involved too!), and you don't mind sex/graphic horror, then I guess this book is for you?
So, I was expecting a really interesting haunted house book.
It starts out sorta like Casper. Dad and teenage daughter move into a creepy house with a secret, AND A GHOST. Unfortunately this ghost is not friendly, it's actually horny. It tries to get on with the dad, possession happens, a lot of other crazy shit happens.
I just couldn't get any further.
If you're up for reading a book that reminds you of Casper (there is a lighthouse involved too!), and you don't mind sex/graphic horror, then I guess this book is for you?
xterminal's review
4.0
Tamara Thorne, Haunted (Pinnacle, 1995)
I'm crazy about Tamara Thorne. It's refreshing (to say the least) to find a writer of good old-fashioned haunted house novels these days; this is probably the first (aside from Thorne's own Bad Things) I've come across, chronologically, since Paula Trachtman published Disturb Not the Dream some twenty years ago, that doesn't have some sort of post-atomic ecological message to shove in my face or some sort of hardboiled-mystery natural explanation. (We'll conveniently overlook Barbara Michaels. After all, she writes romances, delicious as they are, not horror novels.) And that, alone, is enough reason for me to automatically slap above-average status on Miz Thorne's every word.
The only problem, really, and I will be the first to say this may be my fault for reading two of Thorne's novels so close together, is that the words seem remarkably similar between Haunted and Bad Things. We have a single (male) parent moving to California with child(ren) who are sure (we know, as the author winks at us) to be placed in the path of great danger, though the parent doesn't know this. There's a friend at home who, at a moment of crisis, must come out to assist with everything, and the child(ren) has/ve an obsession with taking the car and the Visa card into town (because, of course, we're out in the middle of nowhere). The ghosties, ghoulies, and long-leggetie beasties can't be seen by the rest of us most of the time, but they materialize in order to convince the townsfolk they do exist, thanks to some mechanism that forces them farther into our reality. Etc.
Formula? Absolutely. It's switch-the-characters as much as Barbara Cartland. But Thorne is a far finer writer than Cartland (or Danielle Steel and Nora Roberts, Cartland's living heirs o the multibillion dollar romance market), and at least the characters being switched out are not carbon copies of one another, despite their similar situations. The differences in character from book to book are enough to keep the reader going, which is necessary through some of the book's slower points. (The protagonist here is a writer, and Thorne tells us he's always somewhat nervous through the first half of his books, then towards the end starts writing obsessively, often finishing them in a few weeks. Haunted, it should surprise no one, is paced exactly this way.)
Thorne does Bad Things one better here, with the inclusion of a nasty erotic side to this particular ghost that one couldn't introduce to the Green Man in Bad Things (at least, not without ludicrous chuckles from the audience). This is balanced out by the somewhat slower plot development in the first half of the novel, but once it takes off, it most certainly takes off. The book becomes more compelling as each page turns, until the last hundred pages, which demand to be devoured in one gulp.
Haunted and Bad Things are pretty equal in quality, and Haunted only gets half a star less because I read it second. If you like one, you'll probably like the other. Just don't read them back to back, or the similarities will throw you off. *** 1/2
I'm crazy about Tamara Thorne. It's refreshing (to say the least) to find a writer of good old-fashioned haunted house novels these days; this is probably the first (aside from Thorne's own Bad Things) I've come across, chronologically, since Paula Trachtman published Disturb Not the Dream some twenty years ago, that doesn't have some sort of post-atomic ecological message to shove in my face or some sort of hardboiled-mystery natural explanation. (We'll conveniently overlook Barbara Michaels. After all, she writes romances, delicious as they are, not horror novels.) And that, alone, is enough reason for me to automatically slap above-average status on Miz Thorne's every word.
The only problem, really, and I will be the first to say this may be my fault for reading two of Thorne's novels so close together, is that the words seem remarkably similar between Haunted and Bad Things. We have a single (male) parent moving to California with child(ren) who are sure (we know, as the author winks at us) to be placed in the path of great danger, though the parent doesn't know this. There's a friend at home who, at a moment of crisis, must come out to assist with everything, and the child(ren) has/ve an obsession with taking the car and the Visa card into town (because, of course, we're out in the middle of nowhere). The ghosties, ghoulies, and long-leggetie beasties can't be seen by the rest of us most of the time, but they materialize in order to convince the townsfolk they do exist, thanks to some mechanism that forces them farther into our reality. Etc.
Formula? Absolutely. It's switch-the-characters as much as Barbara Cartland. But Thorne is a far finer writer than Cartland (or Danielle Steel and Nora Roberts, Cartland's living heirs o the multibillion dollar romance market), and at least the characters being switched out are not carbon copies of one another, despite their similar situations. The differences in character from book to book are enough to keep the reader going, which is necessary through some of the book's slower points. (The protagonist here is a writer, and Thorne tells us he's always somewhat nervous through the first half of his books, then towards the end starts writing obsessively, often finishing them in a few weeks. Haunted, it should surprise no one, is paced exactly this way.)
Thorne does Bad Things one better here, with the inclusion of a nasty erotic side to this particular ghost that one couldn't introduce to the Green Man in Bad Things (at least, not without ludicrous chuckles from the audience). This is balanced out by the somewhat slower plot development in the first half of the novel, but once it takes off, it most certainly takes off. The book becomes more compelling as each page turns, until the last hundred pages, which demand to be devoured in one gulp.
Haunted and Bad Things are pretty equal in quality, and Haunted only gets half a star less because I read it second. If you like one, you'll probably like the other. Just don't read them back to back, or the similarities will throw you off. *** 1/2
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