The Night House
A novel
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- ¥1,800
発行者による作品情報
From the internationally best-selling author, a chilling fresh spin on the classic horror novel • When the voices call, don't answer.
“In The Night House, the horror begins immediately. And it only keeps calling from there.”—Josh Malerman, New York Times best-selling author of Bird Box and Spin a Black Yarn
In the wake of his parents’ tragic deaths in a house fire, fourteen-year-old Richard Elauved has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle in the remote, insular town of Ballantyne. Richard quickly earns a reputation as an outcast, and when a classmate named Tom goes missing, everyone suspects the new, angry boy is responsible for his disappearance. No one believes him when he says the telephone booth out by the edge of the woods sucked Tom into the receiver like something out of a horror movie. No one, that is, except Karen, a beguiling fellow outsider who encourages Richard to pursue clues the police refuse to investigate. He traces the number that Tom prank-called from the phone booth to an abandoned house in the Mirror Forest. There he catches a glimpse of a terrifying face in the window. And then the voices begin to whisper in his ear . . .
She’s going to burn. The girl you love is going to burn. There’s nothing you can do about it.
When another classmate disappears, Richard must find a way to prove his innocence—and preserve his sanity—as he grapples with the dark magic that is possessing Ballantyne and pursuing his destruction.
Then again, Richard may not be the most reliable narrator of his own story . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestselling crime writer Nesbø takes a break from his Harry Hole detective series with this wild and ambitious but not entirely successful three-part horror opus. The first and longest section is narrated by Richard Elauved, a rambunctious 14-year-old orphan who delights in playing pranks and manipulating gullible school chums in the small town of Ballantyne. After two friends disappear in his presence under horrifying and otherworldly circumstances, Richard fails to convince incredulous authorities that the supernatural was involved. Instead, he's whisked away to the Rorrim Correctional Facility for Young People. After the distinct and intentional YA vibe of this opening, Nesbø pulls the rug out from under the reader in the novel's second section, skewing the tale in a different direction that sheds light on possible sources for some of the earlier horrors even as it serves up new ones. Then, Nesbø does it again in a third section whose rationalizations for all of the preceding weirdness are disappointingly anticlimactic. Nesbø shows a sure hand at crafting moments of terror, but only his most devoted readers won't cock an eyebrow at the bait-and-switch plotting. Despite some memorable individual scares, horror aficionados are likely to grow frustrated with this.
