Maynard's House
Ratings6
Average rating3.2
Maynard Whittier died in Vietnam and he left his cabin in Maine to his buddy Austin Fletcher. This is an oldy but goody that got reissued by Paperbacks from Hell and I was into this....until I wasn't.
My notes:
Austin has a death walk to town. The cabin has “noises”, the rocking chair creaks on its own, phantom dogs. There's a devil's rock out back and a witch tree on the property. Yes, please.
And then we meet the young girl and the story tanks into a pervy dream. Isolated men in cabins will be boys? Right? Gross.
Needed more witch.
This book was a little too slow for me - so much time was wasted over-describing people from small-town Maine and making strange remarks about Native Americans (I lost count of how many weird “Indian” references the protagonist makes for no reason. Way more of the book is devoted to the main character living in the cabin (nearly an entire chapter about his outhouse!) and his creepy obsession with a local teenage girl than any kind of horror. When the horror starts it comes out swinging, and some of the psychological stuff near the end is decent, but it wasn't enough to turn my opinion around.
A cryptic, creepy haunted shack in Maine with a protagonist so well constructed I felt like I knew him from page 1. Delves into memory and trauma in ways not unlike the early Silent Hill games. I read this in one or two great gulps while snowed in during the first winter storm of the season.