House Across the Way [Hardcover]

Brian McNaughton (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: BERTRAMS PRINT ON DE (December 1, 2001)
• ASIN: B000K2J90U
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars an awesome experience, November 2, 2010

By 

Mark Molnar - See all my reviews

This review is from: The House Across the Way (Hardcover)

brian mcnaughton is yet another lost, unsung author - a tragedy! he did receive some recognition in his life, in the form of a World Fantasy Award for Throne of Bones, a tale of ghouls written in a style reminscent of jack vance and clark ashton smith - drily ironic and often opulent in the description of a strange, dark-fantasy world.

The House Across the Way, despite its faerie villains, is pure horror, set in the here-and-now. in many ways it is a precursor to connolly's Book of Lost Things and feist's rather feeble Faerie Tale. basically the tale is about residents of a small college town learning how much the faerie world really wants to harm them, in the worst possible ways. blood-sucking, corpses walking, dreams of the future and the past, guts strewn hither and thither, time travel, a sinister house-cum-demonic castle, a bizarre and upsetting faculty party, the Eldritch King and his vengeful but sometimes less-than-effective servants, a blind granny, and a haunted playhouse are all featured.

what sets this novel apart from most horror novels are the structure of the narrative and the perspectives of the characters. the reader is plunged right into the narrative, not in a way that inspires breathless page-turning, but rather one that keeps the reader off-kilter: details parsed out slowly and ambiguously, versions of history differing surprisingly depending on the teller, the meaning of the events surrounding the cast of players only becoming gradually clear as events unfold. characterization is also fascinatingly conveyed: although the characters remain fully grounded in reality, they also exist on multiple levels, and somehow mcnaughton is able to make them both very real and disturbingly mythic. another mcnaughton virtue: pulling away from the action or what may even seem like the climax of a key event, only to let that event be recounted through another character's perspective.

the first chapter, perfectly detailing a sad outsider's frame of mind and his upsetting transformation, is striking to say the least; the last three paragraphs: jaw-dropping. another chapter, recounting the long, terrifying night of a corpse that walks, is brilliantly unsettling and dreamlike. and another chapter depicting the advent of a deadly home invasion while a blind grandmother struggles to come to terms with her simultaneous life in two different dimensions starts out as compelling and ends in one of the more gripping, tense horror sequences i've ever read. the final struggle between granny and the Eldritch King is powerful, surreal, and surprisingly moving. the entire novel demands close attention from the reader and i found myself constantly flipping back and forth through the pages to re-read various clues and comments from characters. passive readers will not find much of value in the experience; i loved it.

this was one of my most expensive book buys on amazon (although worth every penny); the prohibitive price and what it means for further exposure to the auther is sad to contemplate. maybe some sweet day it will be packaged in a much cheaper paperback format and hopefully it may truly gain the audience it deserves.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not Lovecraftian or even really beholden to Chambers, September 1, 2008

By 

Matthew T. Carpenter (Peoria, IL, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The House Across the Way (Hardcover)

This is the 4th of Mr. McNaughton's novels to be published by Wildside Press. Unfortunately, unlike the others, this book as far as I can tell is only available in a nice hardcover with a pretty high list price, $37.95. It is discounted on Amazon, but not much. Page count was 209, pretty slim for the cost, but is McNaughton's final novel, I think. Originally the text was published in 1982 as Satan's Surrogate; used copies of this are quite expensive in their own right and I never saw a copy. Unlike Satan's Love Child, which was a pornographic version of Gemini Rising, I do not believe Satan's Surrogate had any objectionable material; the author reports that the text was substantially altered and we may regard THATW as his final thoughts on the text. Production qualities are good; cover art by Jaime Oberschlake was pretty good but did not blow me away.

Where Gemini Rising, Downward to Darkness and Worse Things Waiting had clear Lovecraftian motifs and themes, The House Across the Way was not in the same vein. Do not expect that it is part of the same series of stories. It owes a little bit more to Robert Chambers, with some character names, a maid named Cassilda for example, and a few place names. I have not made a study of reading Chambers' fiction like I have Lovecraft's, but I think there is no other big debt to Chambers beyond this. Similarly, in what I think is a nod towards some of McNaughton's favorite writers, there are place names from Lovecraft: the Whateley Library and the Pickman Museum.

The plot is extremely complicated and the truth only gradually becomes apparent to some of the characters. There are so many characters with such complicated relationships and points of view, and wild twistings of time, that they defy synopsis. The Otherworld is occupied by...the Others, who might be considered as Faerie. Not in the sense of lightness and good, Tolkienesque elves, but dark and incomprehensible, capricious and malicious. They love to torment humans and control them through both their uncontrolled passions and their dreams. The title house of the story occupies an important point of overlap between these realities which makes life fraught with menace for the current occupants. The Eldritch King has dark and mysterious reasons for manipulating humans, as he/it has done through the centuries.

None of this is clear to the characters in the book who fumble through their disorienting lives trying to grasp what is going on. Like in all of Mr. McNaughton's novels that I have read, all the threads come together to make perfect sense of the complex tapestry by the end. Along this wild ride, McNaughton's considerable gifts are on display: he takes us inside the minds of the characters; when it is their point of view, the world is clearly seen out of their eyes. I love the way he lets us sink into the characters' skins. Dialogue is sharp, the plot is propulsive and descriptions of the gory consequences of losing yourself to the Others are deftly written. The denouement was a fitting conclusion to a majestic effort. I was very glad to have read The House Across the Way and highly recommend it to all fans of dark fantasy literature. What a great loss that we will have no more such novels from Mr. McNaughton's pen!