An unforeseeable climax refreshes with its absence of clich‚.

When her father goes mad and locks her up in her room, the old horrors of the asylum reemerge in full force. Meanwhile, Amy comes down with massive headaches as her fears build shredded cobwebby figures begin to chase her through the house. Oswald tells Amy she did the writing in the Bible. Most of the story follows Oswald's deteriorating relationship with Amy, who goes on the radio to announce her fears about Nazareth House and then transcribes diary notes written in the margins of an old Bible by an inmate. And then the photographer on the first floor dies while developing a group picture of the tenants again, oddly, the negative seems to have added a ghostly extra figure not in the original group. Although the oak is soon chopped down for safety's sake, since it creaks with age, people can't seem to hear the woodsmen's axes or, indeed, anything outdoors through their closed windows. One dark night, the arachnid-phobic Oswald walks into what seems at first to be a huge dangling spider outside-but it's only a dying black cat hung from an oak. None of the tenants of the looming skull-like house know that hundreds of years ago Nazareth Hill was a mental asylum where inmates were tortured-or that several ectoplasmal folks, their jaws yawning and arms dropping off, linger. Insurance agent Oswald Priestley, a widower, and his teenage daughter Amy move into Nazareth Hill, a gray office building gutted by fire and revamped for apartments. From Kirkus Reviews:īritish horror novelist Campbell (The One Safe Place, 1996, etc.), expert as ever and with a knack for family chitchat amid the ghoulies, returns with the house from hell. Note: The House on Nazareth Hill is the title of the Headline Press U.K. With this novel has unified the many themes of his earlier work-pure supernaturalism exploration of social and domestic trauma chilling portrayal of psychosis-in a seamless fusion.'

Joshi, award-winning scholar of weird fiction, writes in Necrofile, ' Nazareth Hill will not be long in taking rank as one of the finest haunted house novels in literature, rivaling even Shirley Jackson's masterful The Haunting of Hill House. This perfectly constructed, richly terrifying novel will satisfy even those readers who've been reluctant about Ramsey Campbell. Sixteen-year-old Amy struggles to decipher the messages as her father becomes increasingly dictatorial, fanatical, and monstrous. 'Must survive until they take me from this place.' Scribbled in the margins of an ancient, moldy Bible, found wedged between the roots of a tree, is the truth about what Nazarill (now a luxury apartment building) was centuries ago.

Nazareth Hill by Ramsey Campbell