Customer Reviews

House of Bones

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This book was frightening. There are very, very few books I'd give that adjective to, and many belong to Mr. King himself.

The plot is essentially the same as The House on Haunted Hill. A group of strangers are asked to spend a specific amount of time within a supposedly haunted building, only to learn that they have some connection webbing between them all.

It's not the most original plot in the world, but even Shakespeare was known to recycle from those before him.

Ok, I've already referenced King and Shakespeare here. This book is not in a league with them (nor are they in a league with each other). It's a solid effort, though. There are some groaning points, and moments when you just keep asking why the character is being so stupid, but it's made clear that many of these characters are not of sound mind and not of the best judgment.

What really makes this book, though, are the following:
Setting. Run-down projects with a long history of violence.

Characters. They're diverse with clearly different personalities.
Writing. This book is dense. The paragraphs are long and thick but not cluttered. You're getting a great deal of words for your dollar, as no page is wasted. The result is a clear understanding of the characters and some great, flowing narrative and descriptions.

I suppose the last point could be a sore one for many. My girlfriend started this novel and found it bulky, never finishing it. To me, though, it just made the book richer and livelier. Horror books tend to vary between pages of redundant, gory action narrative and pages of simple, one-sentence dialogue. This book tries to read more like a novel and less like a movie script, and it pays off.

Be aware of some flaws in this book, but it will still shine as you read it. Give it a chance if you want a horror book with moderately more meat than the rest of the market.

About this time last year I called Dale Bailey's The Fallen one of the best contemporary fantasies I'd read in some time. Hardly a year later, Bailey comes round with a second novel, this one contemporary horror -- and how pleasing it is to say that this one's even better.

House of Bones is a haunted house novel for the twenty-first century. Though Bailey fills his story with familiar trappings--a small band of disparate characters, each of whom harbors a secret, tossed into a building haunted, an inner-city highrise that harbors an unknowable and unspeakable evil (a pinch of The Shining, a dash of The Haunting of Hill House) -- he spins these archetypes in wholly new directions. As this crew settles into the haunted Dreamland, reality unspirals around them: disembodied voices, automatic writing, the blood-chilling laughter of a faraway child. Bailey takes writerly care with each of his characters: by novel's end we know their secrets, their fears, their haunted dreams. In the end, they are like family.

I defy anyone to read the last 75 pages in anything but a single sitting: it comes with a roaring, shattering violence that, though horrifying, rings true. Dale Bailey's House of Bones is a novel that will remain with you long after the doors of Dreamland have closed.

Dale Bailey is THE author to watch in today's genre fiction. Not only is his prose beautiful and very imaginative, his plotting is also tight and intricate. His books are usually about characters placed in dawry situations, and not about situations affecting characters. This is psychological horror at its very best.

Bailey is no stranger to the ghost story. He began his career with a non-fiction examination of the haunted house in literature, so it is only fitting that his latest effort touches the very same thing he's been examining for so long. In House of Bones, Bailey throws five strangers into an eery setting that might or might not be haunted. Dreamland was once part of an apartment complex. It is now the only remaining tower, standing alone, forgotten and decrepit. Dreamland has a very strange and violent history, one that was never fully put to rest, one that should never be brought to the surface.

When our five strangers enter the building to try and investigate the strange happenings, they will soon realize that the house itself seems to be very much alive. Paranoia, claustrophobia and fear will start coursing in their veins as the house will slowly close up on them. Their arrival awakens the house and brings back its thirst.

Nothing is as it seems to be. One by one, the five of them will be faced with the horrors and monsters of their past. They will soon discover that the past is always waiting to come back to them. All of them have horrible secrets to hide, and all of them have horrible dreams about the things they've done wrong. When the house awakens, so will their past, and their fear will become a very, very real thing. Everything spirals, leading us to the great climax that will make you keep on turning the pages until the early hours of the morning.

In House of Bones, Bailey fully displays his talents. With only two books and one collection under his belt, he has already become one of the brightest voices in genre fiction. The fact that he never sacrifices character development for plot is a thing most new authors take years to learn. The fact that he carefully construct his stories, where each word has a purpose, only makes this book greater. This is quiet horror at its very best.

Novels about ghosts and hauntings are hard to pull off mainly for the reason that the ghost tale itself has been around for so long that every possible variation on the theme has been done. Dale Bailey's "The House of Bones" balances traditional techniques with the twist of modern social commentary. As in all classic haunted habitat novels and movies (Richard Matheson's "Hell House," Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House," the film "The House on Haunted Hill," for example), the device of an eccentric bringing together a disparate group of strangers, each with a secret, is used. The setting, however, is not the traditional manor, but an abandoned housing project, a place haunted by overwhelming despair that has lived on beyond the physical tenants.
The writing is quite exceptional, the characters all well-rounded and the allegorical use of poverty and racism works very well. First and foremost, however, the novel is also often very terrifying and that is, after all, the true test of a great ghost story.
I think the publisher made a mistake not putting this out in hardcover. It would be a shame if the ephemeral nature of paperback originals causes this one to be overlooked and forgotten. I truly believe it's one of the best ghost stories of recent times, up there with the aforementioned "Hell House" and "The Haunting of Hill House."

Dale Bailey, House of Bones (Signet, 2003)

Ladies and Gentlemen, let me make this clear from the outset: Dale Bailey is the real deal. This is good, solid haunted house horror that will keep you up late at night turning pages.

The mark of an author who knows what he's doing is the ability to draw you in without you knowing exactly where you got drawn in. King does it well, when he doesn't grab you with the first sentence. Carson McCullers was a master at it. Bailey is the heir apparent. I'm not sure where it happened, but somewhere between pages 25 and 65, I found myself wanting to not eat, not sleep, and not do much of anything else until I had finished this book. (I ended up doing so less than forty-eight hours after that. It would have been less if not for a crisis at work.)

Dreamland is your basic housing project. Except for Building Three, where a whole lot of bad things have happened over the years. Dreamland is slated for demolition, but an eccentric billionaire named Ramsey Lomax has bribed the city to halt the demolition of Building Three and allow him to move into it for two weeks. He contacts a number of seemingly diverse people to spend the time with him, investigating the presence of ghostly activity. Four respond: a journalist who spent the first tree years of his life there, a discredited medium, a veteran with a shady past, and a young doctor on the verge of losing her career. The five lock themselves (with the aid of a convenient blizzard) in Dreamland, and the fun begins.

Put together the words "Chicago" and "projects" and the first thing likely to come to any horror or true crime fan's mind is Cabrini Green. Bailey pulls a nice sleight-of-hand, recognizable only to those of who who've seen it before, to differentiate the two, but there are still obvious comparisons. (Some of the events leading to the ghostly activity have shades of real-life crimes committed at Cabrini Green, as well; readers of the works of Peter Sotos will recognize a few of the things Ramsey Lomax points out as he guides his compatriots on their first tour of Dreamland.) There are a few minor loose threads involved with this angle of things (an aerial photo of Dreamland is referred to as looking like Stonehenge, which Bailey draws attention to, and then it's never mentioned again, for example), but nothing that can't be explained away as a red herring.

Where Bailey's writing suffers, and let me rush to say I use the term "suffers" when benchmarking this stuff against classic haunted house literature that makes everyone and their mother's 100-best lists, is that his characterization is developed a bit on the, well, leisurely side. In other words, by the end of the book, you have three-dimensional characters, but in some cases you have to wait till the end of the book to get there. I understand this is a device for hooking the reader, but (a) it's overused and trite, and (b) Bailey's already got more hooks than the slaughterhouse in the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As passe as it may be, this is one place where Bailey could take a few new tricks from the old dog himself, Stephen King (who was, is, and always will be a master of characterization in a few concise lines).

That aside, I cannot say enough good things about Dale Bailey. Read this. You will not regret it. If you download it free online or get it out of the library, I'll even offer a money-back guarantee. ****

Dale Bailey writes very well, but don't hold that against him. Because he knows how to tell a story. Here, he uses some of the classic haunted house elements (a small, eclectic group in a claustrophobic environment) to build a suspenseful and chilling yarn. As a horror writer myself, I don't get scared easily, but this one did it to me a few times. This novel is a little more evolved than his debut, The Fallen, and reflective of a complex philosophy (though the tale never bogs down).

If you like this novel, you might like The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, The Shining by Stephen King, or my forthcoming haunted house novel The Manor.

Dale Bailey has crafted a novel that is as multileveled in its subtext as is Dreamland, the high-rise urban Hell known as THE HOUSE OF BONES. Bailey creates characters that are frightening in their similarities to those around us; they think bad thoughts, are selfish, and are fraught with self-doubt. They move through the novel as we do in real life, toward a nasty end that is one-sided and ugly in its eventuality. Reading HOUSE OF BONES, one knows that life will not end well for its characters as Bailey instills an ever-growing dread and suspense within each page. It's like watching a movie like SE7EN--you know somebody's going to get it, you don't know when, and worse, you never know HOW. It is a page-turner. This novel is an improvement over the excellent FALLEN and his style sings. His is a fresh and literate voice amongst a plethora of writers who would recycle the same novel repeatedly changing only the character's names and little else. It is refreshing to find a writer unafraid to go in a divergent direction and craft work that is not only different in style and voice but in subject matter. Moreover, this book contains important social connotation and could very easily be a mainstream literary novel in the vein of BELOVED. I will not give away plot points of this book as to do so would rob the reader of its majesty and suspense. Don't look at the blurb on the back of the book either if you truly want to be enthralled with and taken over by Dreamland, THE HOUSE OF BONES.

Wow. I was just blown away by this book. This is the story of a place that is just plain bad. Dreamland was a housing development that turned into an urban war zone. Now the city has razed the buildings- all except the third tower, which just happens to be the one with the bloodiest history. Demolition of tower three was halted by a very wealthy man who wants to find out if the rumors about the tower being haunted are true. He brings four people with big problems of their own and ties to the tower along with him, hoping to get to the truth for reasons of his own.

I was truly impressed with this book. I will definitely read more of Bailey's books.

This is Dale Bailey's second novel after the incredible The Fallen and it is simply superb. Bailey doesn't write fast stories, but slowly explores his characters, we get to know them inside out all the way, and then he takes us into their world of darkness. House of Bones is excellent and it deals with four characters who are invited by a billioner to stay for two weeks in a housing project, ready to be demolished due to the evil and violent things which took place there in its past. All fours' lives have been shattered by horrible events in their past and here in Dreamland, the name of the projects, they will come face to face with their past and thus bring upon them ghosts and evil presence gathered in Dreamland. Haunting, extremely well written, and scary. Dale Bailey has a great future ahead of him.

I have a 50 page rule with the books I read. If it doesn't capture my attention in 50 pages, I put it down. Life is just to short to waste on a mediocre book. I was afraid this book was destined for the discard bin. At the 50 page mark I was still intrigued with the story line and decided to expand my rule a few more pages, I am glad I did. By page 80 the story was off and running. It didn't travel at breakneck speed, but it was sure and steady.

Bailey started out a little slow but as the story progressed, so did the action and suspense. This is not the best work of horror I have ever read but it is certainly worth your time. Dreamland is a modern day haunted house and while it may not have alot in the way of ghosts, evil definitely lives here.

In the end, I found myself cheering on the good guys and feeling badly for those who didn't make it. Bailey has alot of potential and I am looking forward to his next effort.