Last Sunday I started reading Dale Bailey's book, House of Bones, deciding then that I didn't want to gorge myself on it -- much as a starved dog wolfs down a ribeye (the steak likely forgotten as soon as it hits his stomach) -- so I nibbled on a little more than 50 pages a night, savoring* the story over the past 7 days. Since daylight really isn't the time for reading scary stuff, I saved the last final bit for late last night, and thoroughly enjoyed the book and its conclusion.

If I remember his statements correctly from an online interview, Bailey wanted to take a stab (bad pun, I know) at writing a haunted house novel at some point after completing a doctoral dissertation on the same subject. Well, Bailey has pulled it off, and House of Bones definitely succeeds in much the same way as King's The Shining at scaring the absolute bejeezus out of the reader. Whoever has Bailey's book in hand will find it difficult not to feel equally trapped in "Dreamland," along with the five main characters.

Bailey's protagonists are an interesting bunch, and all have enigmatic backgrounds. The cast consists of Abel Williams, the ex-host and spirit channeler of the TV show Messages from Beyond; Fletcher Keel, a former cop with a violent past; Ben Prather, an African-American journalist whose white parents adopted him after his family's tragic death; Lara McGovern, an ambitious MD who has haunting memories of her dead identical twin; and Ramsey Lomax, an eccentric billionaire (are they ever really normal?) who has convinced the other four to spend two weeks in Dreamland, the so-nicknamed, abandoned 18-story highrise where violence and death are the best-paying tenants.

And it is Dreamland, itself, that is the sixth and most magnetic character in Bailye's book. All of the flesh-and-blooders have some mysterious relationship with the building and must deal with both their own inner voices and the building's while confronting an already strained group dynamic. Bailey reveals Dreamland's and his characters' histories slowly, and therefore it is difficult to put the book down and turn out the light -- especially when it's apparent that, within the next darkened door, some vital piece of background information lurks.

Many of the story elements in House of Bones recall simliar motifs in King's The Shining. Like the Overlook Hotel, Dreamland's dozens of rooms provide stages for myriad unspeakables to take place. A harsh winter besieges the building, and deep snows prevent the group from making a quick getaway and/or communicating with the outside world. Pyschological breakdown and alcoholism figure prominently in the plot, and the hammer (reminscent of Jack Torrance's roque mallet) turns out not to be just a tool for driving nails. And finally, disturbing messages appear inserted into previously word-proceessed documents. (While this does NOT occur in King's book, it did remind me of the ghost writings, e.g. All work and no play make Jack a dull boy, in Kubrick's film.)

Bailey invested a great deal of thought, research, imagination, and sweat in the book, and if you ask me, what he likely took to the bank afterwards doesn't come close to fully reimbursing him for the bargain the book-buyer comes away with from the bookstore. It just doesn't seem fair that the theater can charge $7.75 for a vacuous 90+ minute retelling of Dawn of the Dead, but a paltry $6.99 is all it takes to buy Bailey's well-written horror novel, an original piece that guarantees many more hours of "mental cinematics." Compared to an average movie director, Dale Bailey is, I'm sure, dramatically underpaid!

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*Is it healthy to "savor" a work of horror?

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Currently Reading:

The Flickering Mind by Todd Oppenheimer
Writing Horror edited by Mort Castle, HWA