The Good House : A Novel [Hardcover]

Tananarive Due (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2003

From the American Book Award winner and author of "one of the most talked about debuts in the horror field since the advent of Stephen King" (Publishers Weekly) comes a terrifying story of supernatural suspense, as a woman searches for the inherited power that can save her hometown from evil forces.

Tananarive Due's first three novels gained her legions of dedicated fans who recognize a true master of the genre. Now she returns with her best yet -- a chilling story set in a small town in the Pacific Northwest. The house Angela Toussaint's late grandmother owned is so beloved that townspeople in Sacajawea, Washington, call it the Good House. But is it?

Angela hoped her grandmother's famous "healing magic" could save her failing marriage while she and her family lived in the old house the summer of 2001. Instead, an unexpected tragedy ripped Angela's family apart.

Now, two years later, Angela is moving past her grief and taking control of her life as a talent agent in Los Angeles, and she is finally ready to revisit the rural house she loved so much as a child. Back in Sacajawea, Angela realizes she hasn't been the only one to suffer a shocking loss. Since she left, there have been more senseless tragedies, and Angela wonders if they are related somehow. Could the events be linked to a terrifying entity Angela's grandmother battled in 1929? Did her teenage son, Corey, reawaken something that should have been left sleeping?

With the help of Myles Fisher, her high school boyfriend, and clues from beyond the grave, Angela races to solve a deadly puzzle that has followed her family for generations. She must summon her own hidden gifts to face the timeless adversary stalking her in her grandmother's house -- and in the Washington woods.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In The Good House, acclaimed novelist Tananarive Due enters classic Stephen King territory. Her novel, set in a small Northern town, centers on a haunted house under a deadly curse. But don't let the comparison scare you: This dark, imaginative, skillfully written page-turner is a novel only Tananarive Due could write.

Early in the Twentieth Century, a powerful voodoo priestess followed her guiding spirit from New Orleans to a small town in Washington State. But in pride and anger, Marie Toussaint unleashed a new--and very different--spirit. Now, ignorant of both her heritage and the curse, Angela Toussaint returns to her dead Grandmother Marie's house, seeking to heal her fractured relationships with her son and her husband. But the malicious spirit wishes only the destruction of the Toussaints; and as it did in her grandmother's day, it inflicts horrific death and destruction upon the isolated town. Soon Angela has lost almost everyone she loves; and she must somehow uncover the secrets of her unknown heritage if she is to have a prayer of saving her true love--and her own soul.

Tananarive Due has written the unconventional vampire novels My Soul to Keep and its sequel, The Living Blood; The Black Rose (a finalist for the NAACP Image Award); and The Between (a Bram Stoker Award nominee). With Dave Barry, Edna Buchanan, Carl Hiassen, Elmore Leonard, and eight others, Due is coauthor of Naked Came the Manatee. --Cynthia Ward

From Publishers Weekly

Using elements of the traditional haunted house story, Due (The Living Blood) constructs an ambitious supernatural thriller reinforced by themes of family ties, racial identity and moral responsibility. The Good House in Sacajawea, Wash., has belonged to four generations of the Toussaint family, but current scion Angela Toussaint hopes to sell it. Originally the home of her beloved grandmere Marie, who used vodou to heal the sick, the house has dispensed mostly pain to Angela, including the suicide of her mother when she was a child and the death of her son, Corey, who shot himself in the basement with a gun belonging to his father, Tariq. Angela's planned final visit dovetails with tragic incidents in town suggesting that a malignant force linked to the house is revving up. Then she discovers that Corey stumbled upon Marie's magic tools, and that, in a forgotten incident, Marie abused her healing powers to avenge an act of racism. Meanwhile, Tariq, who has become a demon incarnate under the house's influence, hastens to Washington for a showdown with his estranged wife. Due handles the potentially unwieldy elements of her novel with confidence, cross-cutting smoothly from past to present, introducing revelatory facts that alter the interpretation of earlier scenes and interjecting powerfully orchestrated moments of supernatural horror that sustain the tale's momentum. An ending that seems forced by an excess of sympathy for her characters is the only misstep in this haunting tale from a writer who grows better with each book.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: Atria; First Edition edition (September 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743449002
• ISBN-13: 978-0743449007
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (71 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #501,733 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Good House is a Good Story!, September 21, 2003

By 

Phyllis Rhodes (Orlando, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: The Good House : A Novel (Hardcover)

Tananarive Due gets better and better with each release! Her latest novel, The Good House, examines the consequences of misusing magic and the power of heritage and family.

The story is set in the remote town of Sacajawea, Washington where in the early 1900's, Marie Touissant relocates from Louisiana guided by her inner voice to a place that can be described in modern terms as the "epicenter of the sprit world". Marie is a trained, experienced, favored vodou priestess and often uses her powers to help and heal others. Through a series of events, Marie (in anger) misuses her talents, is abandoned by the "good" spirits for her actions, and unleashes a vengeful, unrelenting evil spirit that is determined to destroy her and her progeny. Marie watches helplessly as her daughter is possessed and tormented by the spirit. She patiently waits for the opportunity to redeem herself but time is not her friend and she passes before she can banish the spirit.

Fast forward to present day. Marie's granddaughter, Angela, is clueless about her grandmother's secrets; but when tragedy strikes at the family home (The Good House) and a destructive pattern emerges at the expense of her loved ones, she begins to suspect and believe that there is no such thing as coincidence. She must quickly discover the cause of these bizarre fatalities, her dead grandmother's role in it, and a method of containing or eradicating the evil before it consumes her and all her loved ones.

This book is a suspenseful page-turner from beginning to end. It is wonderfully conceived and superbly written!! Due exhibits great expertise when she weaves together the spiritual aspects (Christianity, Vodou, Native American and African/Caribbean spiritualism), the history of the great Northwest, racial sensitivities, and family values. It is my opinion that very few authors could have blended such a diverse set of topics so brilliantly. Keep `em coming, Ms. Due....we can't get enough!!

Reviewed by Phyllis
APOOO BookClub, The Nubian Circle Book Club

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Are You Ready for This?, November 6, 2003

By 

Dianne L. Davidson - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Good House : A Novel (Hardcover)

You read "My Soul to Keep," and you enjoyed the sequel, "The Living Blood," but nothing in either of those two earlier Tananarive Due books could have prepared her dedicated fans for this one!

Angela Toussaint returns to her late gramma Marie's house for the summer hoping for some healing powers that would bring her own family closer together. She's separated from her husband Tariq, and her teenage son, Corey, splits his time between both parents. While gramma Marie has been trying to communicate or reach out to Angie, Angie has not been receptive so gramma reached the only other blood relative, Corey. Things pick up and start spinning wildly and unworldly out of control on the evening of Angie's 4th of July party. WARNING: if you're a big scradie-cat don't read this book at night just before going to bed.

Gramma Marie was a well-respected voodoo priestess and before her death, in a fit of anger, she enlisted the help of the evil "baka" to punish her enemies. The baka, once called upon never wants to return and is bent on destroying anything and everything that attempts to send it back -- particularly anyone from the Troussaint bloodline.

Get ready, prepare yourself for this wild ride. "House on a Haunted Hill," "The Blair Witch Project," and "The Exorcist," all in one -- and then some. Ms. Due, you've outdone yourself.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Due just keeps getting better., January 5, 2004

By 

Henry W. Wagner (Rockaway, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Good House : A Novel (Hardcover)

Angela Toussaint has mixed feelings about the offer to buy her family home in Sacajawea, Washington. The property has been in her family for decades (her grandmother, Marie Touissaint, is a local legend). It's also the place where her teenaged son, Corey, died two years earlier under suspicious circumstances (though his death was officially declared a suicide). Although she fled the house after the tragedy, she decides she must return to the home, known by the locals as "The Goode House," before making her final decision.

On her return to Sacajawea, Angela slowly comes to realize that something strange and lethal is going on there, and that the Goode House is at the epicenter of the mystery. She investigates, hoping to uncover the source of misery that has plagued her family and the citizens of Sacajawea since her grandmother's time. Doing so, she stirs up vengeful ancient forces that seek her destruction.

As in previous novels, Due focuses intensely on family dynamics. Angela and her husband, Tariq, were having problems even before Corey's death. Negatively influenced by the entity that seeks retribution on Angela, Tariq later becomes a warped symbol of their failed marriage. Here, however, the focus is not so much on spouses as it is on the bonds between a mother and her child. Despite the intimacy inherent in that bond, mothers and children are often strangers to each other--Due seems to suggest that complete understanding is beyond either party. Acceptance, however, can lead to greater affinity.

Due takes her time with her narrative, allowing for extensive development of her characters and painstaking stage setting. As in previous works, her characters stand out--she cares about the people who populate her novels, and is eager to explore their frailties and hidden strengths. Angela is the best example; an able, tough-minded heroine, her fears, doubts and motivations all ring true. Due also does a masterful job of maintaining readers' interest, using changes in perspective and point of view to gradually illuminate the book's central mysteries.

THE GOOD HOUSE shows Due to be a writer of great scope, depth, and empathy. An absorbing and frightening tale, THE GOOD HOUSE firmly establishes her as one of the modern masters of the horror genre, a writer who shows us more with each successive effort.