Beneath the Stairs
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
In this chilling and atmospheric novel of psychological horror, a woman returns to her hometown to confront the shadows of her past after her best friend’s suicide attempt at an infamous haunted house.
Few in sleepy Sumner’s Mills have stumbled across the Octagon House hidden deep in the woods. Even fewer are brave enough to trespass. A man had killed his wife and two young daughters there, a shocking, gruesome crime that the sleepy upstate New York town tried to bury. One summer night, an emboldened fourteen-year-old Clare and her best friend, Abby, ventured into the Octagon House. Clare came out, but a piece of Abby never did.
Twenty years later, Clare receives word that Abby has attempted suicide at the Octagon House and now lies in a coma. With little to lose, Clare returns to her roots to uncover the darkness responsible for ruining their lives.
A “spellbinding horror story, where the terror comes not from ghosts, but from the haunted places we find within ourselves” (Elizabeth Brundage, author of The Vanishing Point), Beneath the Stairs is perfect for fans of Jennifer McMahon, Simone St. James, and Chris Bohjalian.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Octagon House in Sumner's Mills, N.Y., the setting of Fawcett's atmospheric if cliché-hobbled debut, is notorious for the never-solved disappearance of its builder's fiancée and her six-year-old daughter in 1936 and the murderous attack on a mother and her two young girls there in 1965. In the present, the ruined house's pernicious pull threatens Clare Madden and Abby Lindsay, long-estranged childhood friends who remain haunted in different ways after their traumatic experience there as teens in 1998. When Abby's parents reach out to tell Clare that Abby's hospitalized following an apparent suicide attempt at Octagon House, Clare, whose life in Chicago has been unraveling after a miscarriage, returns to help—and to see if she can figure out how to finally free them both from the house's spell. Fawcett skillfully intercuts present-day action with flashbacks to adolescents Abby and Clair and Octagon House's fraught earlier history, but the genuine horrors she gradually reveals are buried under haunted-house chestnuts and jumbled plotting leading to what feels like a forced optimistic finale. The imaginative flair she displays promises better for next time.
