Bishop's Landing

by Richard Forsythe

Dr Albert Conrad, a clinical psychologist, had been researching the causes and effects of phobias and panic-fear reactions. He developed an experiment to flesh out his research, but he needed stable volunteers.

After much searching, Dr Conrad found four willing subjects. He took them to a supposedly haunted house in Bishop's Landing for the study, scoffing at the whispered warnings of the frightened townspeople.

The house was waiting. The Evil was patient, and would soon rise to shred the study of fear with such unearthly terror that the survivors would envy the dead!

Genres: Horror

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Reviews

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

A slow (and I mean slow) burn haunted house story from back in 1980. BL took a while to get going for sure, with Forsythe spending the first half of the book building characters. This had an interesting format, with quotations from police interviews by the head cop trying to figure out what happened interspersed throughout the text. So, right from the get go, we know something bad will happen at the old Marsh house outside of Bishop's Landing, a very small river town north of St. Louis, but Forsythe makes you work for it.

The main idea is a psychological researcher at a university in St. Louis is scrambling to figure out how to advance his latest project before the board pulls the money plug. His research concerns the areas of panic and fear. The problem with testing these attributes in a lab is that the people are not scared as they know it is a lab test. So, he has to think outside the box so to speak. One day he, quite by accident, drives by an amazing old house in the boonies just outside Bishop's Landing. The owner of the house runs a fish store there and after some back and forth, decides to let the Doctor conduct his experiment in his house. The house was build just after the civil war by his grandfather, but has been vacant for over 20 years. Needless to say, it is rumored to be haunted.

The entire first half of the book concerns the doctor and his trying to find ideal subjects for the test. He thinks they must be exceptional people in certain regards, like having the ability to conquer fear, and ends up with a cop, a race car driver, a professional photographer and a grad student in English. Once they get to the old house, strange things start to happen...

I enjoyed this more for the historical aspect than for the horror involved. Yes, some decent scares, but all the talk about inflation, recessions (you know, the stagflation of the 1970s) really brought back some nostalgia about the era. Also, the book has several flashbacks to the civil war era and after that were interesting regarding the war and the river economy. The characters were decent, although Forsythe probably gave us a few too many here that did not really do much for the plot. Overall, a fun read, but I am not sure I would track a copy down if you do not have one. My 1980 Leisure edition is ratty to say the least, with several typos and fudged print to boot. 3 solid stars.

[Reed Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Think The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson mixed with Hell House by Richard Matheson, with Evil Dead thrown in. That’s what you get with Bishops Landing by Richard Forsythe. Great novel, with suspense, terror, dread, gore, and oh shit moments. Definitely up to par with Matheson’s Hell House.

[Hugo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pinching a template from Jackson and Matheson, Forsythe gamely presents his take on the Group of People Test the Haunted House theme, and starts off well by starting off well before the haunting itself. Despite this, for all that there are pages and pages (all of them eminently readable) of incident, anecdote and background, the characters rarely come to life on the page. Structurally, this is pretty flawless: suspense and intrigue built up naturally, and augmented by strategically placed flashbacks, and a style possibly peculiar to Forsythe in which his character viewpoints will switch about within a scene, flashbacks will happen within a dialogue, and characters will intersperse these with interjections and commentary - it's very filmic and, once you get used to it, quite immersive. And when you get used to there being ghosts, Forsythe throws black magic and zombies at you.

Notwithstanding these strengths, there is some poor writing on display here. Forsythe seems very keen on stuttering dialogue w-w-which... be-be-co-becomes...qu-quite...wear-we-wearing... after-ter... a-a while, though this pales beside the terrible onomatopoeic representation of Spooky Sounds ("...poit-GRNNN-N-NKKK-K..." - that's the sound of something creeping up behind you in the cellar; "B-LOOOMM-BAM!-PWOOO-W-w-w!" is a bullet ricocheting from a car door) which only serve to completely dispel any mood Forsythe has conjured.

I enjoyed this, despite the faults, though there's possibly a better novel (certainly not a worse one) for being edited down by a hundred pages or so by a judicious editor.

[Colvet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book was just decent in my opinion. I really enjoy the concept of a haunted house/medical experiment gone wrong. At the beginning of the book I kept thinking, "Yeah, that's a great idea for how to study fear and paranoia." However, where I feel as if this book failed is so much of the book was spent setting the experiment up. Forsythe went through extensive detail to justify how/why Dr. Conrad's experiments were being performed and who and how he is collecting his subjects. In fact this makes up 200+ pages or so of this 350-ish page book. It dragged on to say the least. Then when the actual action happened, it seemed like the details of it were glossed over. I was pretty bummed to find out that Dr. Conrad was rigging the experiment from the get-go, like the participants of the study. But then the extra "evil" was never fully explained. I wish more action and details on the experiment were added in place of the 200+ page "rising action" and backstory.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is tame and kind of lame but I like the milieu of old horror paperbacks so this gets a pass. It’s a Scooby-Doo type setup where the ghosts are fake at first until the real ghosts show up. It’s not as fun as that description might imply, but again, I just like the bland milieu of dated relationship problems and such. Nothing special but I don’t feel like I wasted my time one this one.

[Greg · Rating 2 out of 5]

As others have noted, ridiculously overwritten and over long. There’s so much time spent on pointless backstories it takes forever to get to the actual supernatural bad guy, whose motives are never really explain beyond “evil.” It might have been a three star book with half the pages ripped out.

[Scott Oliver · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit of a slow burner (and I do mean slow) but enjoyed it all the same

With probably the best line “I’m a fucked duck if I can figure out what it was”