The Haunting of Leigh Harker
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- USD 4.99
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- USD 4.99
Publisher Description
Leigh Harker's quiet suburban home was her sanctuary for more than a decade, until things abruptly changed. Curtains open by themselves. Radios turn off and on. And a dark figure looms in the shadows of her bedroom door at night, watching her, waiting for her to finally let down her guard enough to fall asleep.
Pushed to her limits but unwilling to abandon her home, Leigh struggles to find answers. But each step forces her towards something more terrifying than she ever imagined.
A poisonous shadow seeps from the locked door beneath the stairs. The handle rattles through the night and fingernails scratch at the wood. Her home harbours dangerous secrets, and now that Leigh is trapped within its walls, she fears she may never escape.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Coates (The Whispering Dead) revisits the haunted house story with this slow-burning horror novel. The odyssey of first-person narrator Leigh Harker occurs entirely within the old house where, she says, "the moment I stepped into it, I felt like I was home." But while Leigh's commitment to the house is rock-solid, there's not much in the way of hints as to why she feels that way—a debilitating gap in a story that spends its first third solely describing Leigh's encounters with a terrifying presence that chases her around and out of the building. Why doesn't Leigh, a single professional woman, just leave? What is the house's history? Who is the presence? Coates is in no hurry to answer or even clearly pose these questions, and the excellence of the descriptions wears thin with repetition. The story finally breaks open when Leigh meets the elderly Sarah, whose memories of the house jolt the plot to life, turning both Leigh's and the reader's preconceptions on their head in a solid twist. An offbeat partnership develops between the two women as they work to understand the haunting, bringing long-awaited closure to the nagging, neglected questions of the opening. The only issue left outstanding is whether readers will stick with the prolonged exposition to reach the payoff.
