The Dead House

The Dead Houseicon

by Billy O'Callaghan

Publisher
Arcade
Publication
May 01, 2018
Format
EBook
Illustrated
No
Price
$16.99
ISBN
B073VXFF69
ASIN
B073VXFF69
Pages
153
Age
Adult 18+

Rights Sold

🌍 World Wide Rights Available

Description

Sometimes the past endures—and sometimes it never lets go.

This best-selling debut by an award-winning writer is both an eerie contemporary ghost story and a dread-inducing psychological thriller. Maggie is a successful young artist who has had bad luck with men. Her last put her in the hospital and, after she’s healed physically, left her needing to get out of London to heal mentally and find a place of quiet that will restore her creative spirit. On the rugged west coast of Ireland, perched on a wild cliff side, she spies the shell of a cottage that dates back to Great Famine and decides to buy it. When work on the house is done, she invites her dealer to come for the weekend to celebrate along with a couple of women friends, one of whom will become his wife. On the boozy last night, the other friend pulls out an Ouija board. What sinister thing they summon, once invited, will never go.

Ireland is a country haunted by its past. In Billy O'Callaghan's hands, its terrible beauty becomes a force of inescapable horror that reaches far back in time, before the Famine, before Christianity, to a pagan place where nature and superstition are bound in an endless knot.

Awards & Endorsements

Review
“Still you keep reading, half-believing that dark forces are stirring, the way you might feel a planchette sliding across a Ouija board. Is it really happening? Or are you convincing yourself there’s more going on here than there really is? Either way, you enjoy the creepy thrill.”—New York Times Book Review

"A solid addition to the treasury of campfire ghost stories. . . . The past in
The Dead House is 'thick as tar,' as one character puts it, and its evils are content to bide their time, waiting for unwary visitors."—Wall Street Journal

"A contemporary ghost story that will chill you to your bones."—
Bustle

“Chilling, beautifully written . . . Fans of psychological thrillers with a ghostly undercurrent will be richly rewarded.”—
Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Billy O’Callaghan’s
The Dead House is a perfectly constructed ghost story, an authentically disquieting tale about the old, old cruelty that lives in the land and never dies. It really did scare me.”—Owen King, author of Double Feature: A Novel and coauthor of Sleeping Beauties

“Atmospheric and unsettling,
The Dead House takes the traditions of classic ghost stories and builds on them with a contemporary twist. A terrific read.”—John Boyne, award-winning and New York Times–bestselling author

"A subdued chiller . . . There will be more than a few goosebumps raised before the reader finishes this one."—
New York Journal of Books

"I know of no other writer on either side of the Atlantic who is better at exploring the human spirit under assault than Billy O'Callaghan."—Robert Olen Butler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

"A moving work that builds to an e...

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