Shut-ins and Shiners

I’m on a haunted house kick. Last week it was Kill Creek. This week it’s Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings. In it, a young couple rent an idyllic vacation home at a stupefying price. The catch: the owners’ elderly mother lives in a bedroom on the top floor and refuses to come down. Anyone who rents the house is required to prep her food, three times a day, and leave it in the hallway at her door. Sometimes she eats it, sometimes she doesn’t.

There’s not a lot of surface action in Burnt Offerings and, in retrospect, it doesn’t seem like anything “crazy” happens for the majority of the book. Yet it’s a pleasantly short novel and its characters are lively and real (enough). Meanwhile, the big question (What the hell is really going on?) urges the reader forward even if the final destination will probably seem a little old hat to many readers today.

Stephen King said it was one of the inspirations for The Shining. I preferred that book. Very few novels “get to me,” but that one did it with its late night footsteps and phantom elevator rides. The sequel, Dr. Sleep is… well, I’ve rarely been so hyped and ultimately disappointed. I loved the idea of an older Danny facing off against the not-vampires known as The True Knot. Everything I’d heard about it during the long months leading up to its release sounded perfect. Things weren’t perfect, though.

It still hurts to this day.

Five years ago, the Evil Dead remake left me unimpressed. I’ve come around. The movie still has plenty of things I dislike (horror directors really need to stop doing “creepy” shit with mirrors), but it’s an achievement in terms of pacing and gore. Fede Álvarez strikes me as the director Rob Zombie thinks he is while Jane Levy is utterly believable in portraying terror, which is something 90% of horror movies get wrong.

I’m excited for Álvarez’s Don’t Breathe 2, but I have a feeling it’s going to be one of those movies which gets talked about and never made, like his plans for a sequel to Evil Dead. Oh well.