House of Windows

by John Langan

For the last few years, Veronica Croydon has been at the center of scandal, first as the younger woman for whom her famous professor left his wife, and then as his apparent widow. When a writer staying at the same vacation home as Veronica has the chance to hear her story, he jumps at it. What follows takes him to the dark heart of a father's troubled relationship with his only son, in a story that stretches from the Hudson Valley to Afghanistan; and from post-9/11 America to Victorian England.
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La Maison des Fenêtres

Depuis quelques années, Veronica Croydon est au cœur d'un scandale : d'abord comme la jeune femme pour laquelle son célèbre professeur a quitté sa femme, puis comme sa veuve. Lorsqu'un écrivain séjournant dans la même maison de vacances que Veronica a l'occasion d'entendre son histoire, il la saisit sans hésiter. Ce qui suit le plonge au cœur des relations complexes entre un père et son fils unique, dans un récit qui s'étend de la vallée de l'Hudson à l'Afghanistan, et de l'Amérique post-11 septembre à l'Angleterre victorienne.

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Gothic, Supernatural, Weird Fiction, Mystery, Ghosts

576 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2009

About the author

John Langan is the author of two novels, The Fisherman (Word Horde 2016) and House of Windows (Night Shade 2009), and two collections of stories, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (Hippocampus 2013) and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime 2008). With Paul Tremblay, he co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (Prime 2011). He's one of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Awards, for which he served as a juror during its first three years. Currently, he reviews horror and dark fantasy for Locus magazine.

John Langan lives in New York's Hudson Valley with his wife, younger son, and many, many animals. He teaches at SUNY New Paltz. He's working toward his black belt in the Korean martial art of Tang Soo Do.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

The novel centers around Veronica (young, beautiful grad student) and Roger (65 yr old divorcee, well-established and respected Dickens scholar/professor, who’s son Ted had joined the Army and is killed in Afghanistan) and their complex relationship/marriage, the relationships they have/had with their parents, and ultimately the relationships they have with themselves as well. Langan isn’t interested in heroes, and Roger and Veronica are painfully human, and he has the courage in a first novel to devote a lot of time to developing them, big fat warts and all. It more than pays off when the strange occurrences at the Belvedere house begin to take place. Langan offers no easy answers or explanations to the happenings, which give the proceedings the weight of reality even as reality breaks down for his characters. And within these shifting threads of the narrative, character motivation, and even of the physical house itself, the idea of story (and how we’re defined by story) is everywhere.

“Dickens tries to come to terms with his childhood traumas, his adult ambivalences, by writing about them over and over. Hawthorne tries to clarify his Puritan legacy to himself in story after story. Whenever something happens to you–something too much–you create a story to deal with it, to define if not contain it.”

[Gareth Is Haunted · Rating 4 out of 5]

House of Windows is a super scary and thrilling slow burn of a book that mixes a spooky haunted house story with a complicated family drama.

'It’s just there was that same sense you have living in a fairy tale that here is a world that operates according to different rules than the ones we’re used to. Mirrors can answer questions; animals can speak; there are dwarfs and witches and glass slippers.'

The main character, Veronica, is a young widow who has been the talk of the town ever since her husband, a famous English professor, left his wife for her. She meets a writer at a vacation home, who is curious about her story and asks her to tell it to him. She tells him how she fell in love with her husband, Roger, and how their marriage was affected by his son from another marriage, Teddy, who joined the army and died in Afghanistan. She also tells him about the Belvedere House, a weird and huge mansion that Roger got from his dad, and that seems to have a face and a mind of its own.

“Mirrors hold more than reflections. There are corners in them around which we do not—we dare not—see,”

The book is full of surprises, as Veronica's past and present crash into each other in scary ways. Langan's writing is beautiful and fancy, and he makes you feel like you're really there and interlaces some of his trademark comsmuc horror just for a little extra spice. He takes you from a college town in the Hudson Valley to the war zones of Afghanistan, from post-9/11 America to Victorian England. He also talks about themes of loss, guilt, memory, and identity, as well as books and the occult. House of Windows is a creepy and amazing book that you won't forget anytime soon.

[Carol · Rating 2 out of 5]

"The Ghost Story Junkie" was looking for a good, haunted house, ghost story and this sounded like it would fit the bill...but it only patricianly did the trick. Too many unimportant details that might not have "broken" the story, it did nothing to "make" it either. Characters walk from room to room, or have showers, or order food to take out, or go up and down stairs, or ponder this, that and the other…all of which took from the story’s momentum. There was also a rather long narrative thread involving research into their house which seemed to peter out and just become forgotten. The toxic tension between the father and the son went on throughout the entire story. It just needed less mundane details and more, well more something.

[S.P. · Rating 5 out of 5]

English professor and well-known Dickens scholar Roger Croydon has disappeared. The tale his wife Veronica offers to a young horror writer, over late-night glasses of wine at the home of an acquaintance, is intended to describe the circumstances of that disappearance. In fact, no final explanation may be possible. The answers lie in the complex geometric structure of the house occupied by the Croydons, and in the harsh words spoken by Roger to his only son, Ted, just prior to Ted's deployment to Afghanistan.

House of Windows is a remarkably engaging synthesis of Dickensian themes, classic tales of terror such as "The Monkey's Paw" and the stories of Shirley Jackson and M.R. James. To the author's credit the novel does not read like a scholarly work but a believable exploration of human weakness and parental grief. In the best horror tradition, John Langan creates a plausible landscape with recognizable characters to convince us of the possibility of the supernatural in every day life.

Roger's marriage to Veronica (one of his former graduate students) is the final straw in a lifelong conflict between Roger and his son. When that conflict erupts into physical violence the two men part company, but not before Roger delivers a farewell speech which Veronica, in its aftermath, comes to see as a curse. Roger refuses to admit the nature of his final words to Ted, and begins to assemble a strange map intended to account for all conditions in the known world at the exact moment of Ted's demise. Descending into this geometrical and astronomical endeavor, Roger is unaware of the forces his efforts are unleashing upon his home and his wife.

Langan is never overly explicit in his depiction of Roger and Veronica as they construct their private nightmare. He doesn't explain what happens. Instead he allows a character that is significantly flawed and morally ambiguous to guide us through the last days of an increasingly unhappy life. Like Eleanor in Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, Veronica is not intended to elicit the reader's sympathy. Rather she reveals what she knows of events that have left her damaged beyond repair, and her knowledge is obviously limited. We catch glimpses of the emerging horror in her marriage, and we are meant to put together the pieces of this disturbing jigsaw. The scary scenes are that much sharper and unsettling because our imagination keeps filling in the gaps.

John Langan's previous published work includes the collection Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters. He seems to be mining the territory shared by Joe Hill and Peter Straub-the meticulously described real world occasionally losing focus to reveal something quite horrible just beneath the surface. It might not be real. It might be an illusion or a psychological state, but it chills us nevertheless. Perhaps it would not be so frightening, if it did not follow our protagonist's movements with such merciless precision.

(Note: I received a review copy from Night Shade Books when the novel was first released.)

[Frank Errington · Rating 4 out of 5]

House of Windows by John Langan is a bit of an anomaly for me, a foray into the world of literary horror. I tend to lean toward books written in the vernacular of the common people, like myself. And then I go and use a word like vernacular, seems John's work is already having an effect on me.

House of Windows is a story told by Veronica Croyden and is mostly about the events leading to her husband's disappearance. It's a ghost story, of sorts. Or at least a haunting since you could say both Veronica and her much older husband are haunted by the death of Roger's son from a former marriage.

Central to the tale is the Belvedere House name for a minor painter who had summered there half a century ago.

"We bought the house for a song and a fairly cheap tune at that."

Along the way, Langan provides occasional insight into the human condition. I particularly liked his take on being a teenager...

"When you're a teenager—or at least, when I was, the last thing I wanted was for my parents to identify with me. I wanted them to respect who I was, which was, of course, completely different from either of them, let me do what I wanted to, and provide food, shelter, and cash as needed. Neither of them lived up to that ideal—not even close. What it boiled down to was, Dad was slightly less annoying than Mom."

There were times I found myself asking, "Do I really care about any of these characters?" But, I just couldn't pull away from the drama.

House of Windows was John Langan's first novel and it had a hard time finding a home. The genre people weren't happy with all the literary stuff, and the literary people weren't happy with the genre stuff.

I am glad the story found a home which made it easier to get John's next work published, the critically acclaimed novel, The Fisherman.

Recommended.

Originally published in 2009, House of Windows, found a new home with Diversion Books in 2017 and is currently available in hardcover, paperback, and e-book formats.

From the author's bio - John Langan is the author of two novels, The Fisherman (Word Horde 2016) and House of Windows (Night Shade 2009/Diversion 2017), and two collections of stories, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (Hippocampus 2013) and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime 2008). The Fisherman won the Bram Stoker and This Is Horror Awards for superior achievement in a novel in 2016. He's one of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Awards, for which he served as a juror during its first three years. Currently, he reviews horror and dark fantasy for Locus magazine. In 2018, his next collection, Sefira, and Other Betrayals, will be published by Hippocampus Press.

[Jon Von · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this one a few years back but still remember it well. More of a literary novel than the author’s subsequent works. It’s a haunted house novel but a deeply personal tale about a son and his parent’s strained marriage. It is long and not especially plot-driven, but I remember it being very intelligent and moving otherwise. This seems like it was a serious novel from Langan before he fell into doing more directly genre stuff.

[Tom A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A confounding, literate, and yet subtly scary book.

John Langan. I don’t know what to expect when I read him. Would the tale be a terrifying second-person point-of-view shocker like Mother of Stone ? Would it be a complete mess like the pretentious and obtuse The Shallows ? I would not know since Langan is considered by his peers and critics as the more experimental among the new weird fiction authors; he will always find a way to deconstruct a horror trope or an idea and then apply a relatively appropriate style to it. I say relatively appropriate since the style adopted is sometimes irritatingly unnecessary and ultimately hinders the impact of the tale. Other times, the experiment, to quote Roger Ebert’s review of Mulholland Drive, “doesn't shatter the test tubes” and comes out as exciting, innovative, and memorable. To experience the variety of his writing, check out his action-packed vampire tale The Wide Carnivorous Sky and read the subtle and creepy Mr. Gaunt. A John Langan short story might not be for you with regard to style or content, but the ones you love you will never forget.

The eventual question, of course, is how would John Langan tackle a full-length book?

I knew of this novel's existence only after the success of his second novel The Fisherman . But I don’t want to experience what a writer is capable of after his success; I want to experience his work when the desperation of not getting published was still there, together with the constant self-examination and doubt. But after reading House of Windows , it seemed that Langan had been in the literary horror writing gig for years already. It is brimming with self-confidence and proceeds to inform the world of his skill and worth as a writer with regard to full-length novels.

The book's engine is the characters’ narration of their experiences with regard to the missing main character Roger Croydon and the Belvedere House, a house of unfathomable magic and mystery. The storytelling done by the characters spare no detail; we get to learn about them (painstakingly), their relationship with each other and the eventual supernatural (?) encounters they have. This is dreary material for most readers and I was expecting this book to lull me to altered states of consciousness. This was not the case; I read and sympathized with the characters and viewed them as very flawed people living good lives not meant for them. One lesson always doled out by horror writers (but sadly never followed by them) is to make your readers care for the characters in the book. Langan does just that and I admit that I found myself heavily invested in the proceedings regarding the family life of the characters.

It’s not just the characterization that makes it great; it’s the ideas, too. The Belvedere house’s history is discussed and dissected under every haunted house trope under the sun. (Is there an Indian Burial ground under the house? Nope). It even discussed Fritz Lieber’s concept of place-magic as well as the cosmic and alien geometries of Lovecraft. There are also numerous discussions on the concept of time and how it might apply to the concept of ghosts. Does it reveal anything, though? I don’t know but I am sure you will have your own theory at the end of the book.

I also have to point out the ability of the book to scare. Have you read a “jump-scare” before in a horror novel? If you have not, there is one in this book that works perfectly. The subtlety in which it is delivered and executed is a testament to Langan’s talent. The “scare factor’ might be low but when it happens it is done with perfect execution.

I have read some unkind comments that Langan is “Peter Straub-lite”. Don’t worry; I have read Straub and I find Langan more compelling, relatable, and readable. But that’s just me.

[Phillip Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

An awesome 4.5. I don't think I've read a haunted house book as ambitious and "out there" as this.

[Sean · Rating 1 out of 5]

There's a good idea for a ghost story in this book, but it gets lost in an overwritten, rather meandering narrative that too often forgets it's supposed to be a horror novel. The main characters--a couple of pretentious college instructors--are rarely sympathetic despite their tragic circumstances, and there's almost no dramatic tension. Pacing is essentially nonexistent, and the book reads like a tome three times its actual size. The reader's persistence is rewarded only by an ambiguous anticlimax and a lot of loose ends. Perhaps the author has written better books, but I doubt that I'll be looking them up anytime soon.

[inciminci · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly, I'm a little underwhelmed by House of Windows, mainly because of me not being able to warm up to the pacing and to not liking the narrator, young grad student Veronica whose husband is missing without a trace, at all. In a frame story Veronica tells a colleague and friend of hers the events leading to the day he disappeared, starting with the very beginning of their relationship, when Roger was still married with a son, whom he basically leaves for Veronica.
Having a similar family history as the starting situation of the book, I initially thought "House of Windows" would be right up my street, but unfortunately it wasn't. First of all, and that's nothing new to loyal readers of Langan, he makes excessive use of the so-called slow-burning narration and a little too much for my taste. I understand the need to build up a background for a character, but since I didn't enjoy Veronica at all, I didn't care about her relationship to her parents or the extensive takeout dinners she has with her husband and many other similar details. These started to annoy me after a while.
I genuinely think Langan has a hand for terrifying, dreadful scenes and here too, he doesn't disappoint. There are some rougher scenes that will seriously curdle your blood and more scenes, especially the ones taking place between Roger and Ted, that will get under your skin. I also like the history of the house and the little story within story recounting the previous owner. And finally, another nicety is the sheer amount of allusions and references comprised in this work - Dickens, Lovecraft, Shakespeare, Peter Straub… But those did not outweigh the overall sluggish pacing and by the time I reached them I already had kind of lost interest. If you enjoy extreme slow pacing, have a fondness for Dickens and can click with the narrator though, this could still be YOUR book.

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the great horror novels.
It is full of what has gone before it - thoughts, themes and reflections from and of Shakespeare, both Jameses, Hawthorne, Leiber, Emily Dickinson and more. It's also a story that patterns itself around current events - around 9/11 and the war on terror - like scar tissue around a civilizational wound. It's an indelible, essential meditation on generational legacies, on spirits, places and the spirit of places. It's sometimes maddeningly dilatory in its pursuit of precision, which pegs it closest to Henry James, except Langan doesn't give his nestled female narrator short shrift after building her character. Oh yes, there's a nestled narrative - hello, Mary Shelley - and at least one unreliable narrator. Byt this isn't a box of tricks - instead, it's a big, spacious, claustrophobic haunted house in itself

[Dorothy Emry · Rating 2 out of 5]

On StaticMultimedia.com I gave this 2 1/2 stars. Below are some highlights from that review:

A convoluted, psychological ghost story, John Langan’s House of Windows may hold your interest if your taste runs to literary novels (or if you are a staunch fan of the works of Charles Dickens, which eventually become integral to the plot). If you are looking for an edgy, chill-filled horror novel, look elsewhere.

A sick house, a painter whose work can reshape reality, special places that can act as portals to another reality, the grief-stricken survivor trying to communicate with or save the dead loved one from a black eternity are all nothing new. As the old adage goes, there are no new stories....While Langan has found some interesting twists on the old elements, the sum of his construction is not enough to sustain suspense. In novel length, the story drags on much too long.

Veronica Croydon, the second wife and widow of a renowned English professor, tells the story of her marriage and her husband’s mysterious disappearance over the course of two nights to a young writer...first in a succinct manner, then in more detail, then again in more depth...The plot device of one character telling the main story to another, which may have worked in years ago in Emily Bontë’s Wuthering Heights, can’t help but feel outdated and contrived.

...certain parts of this story do stick in the memory, but overall, the plot drags to the point of inertia. At times, it feels the reader is actually doing the research on the house’s history with Veronica instead of being propelled into the depths of a heart-pounding mystery by her discoveries.

To read my full review go to: http://www.staticmultimedia.com/print...

[Orrin Grey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a big fan of John Langan's short fiction, so I was really looking forward to his debut novel. And it seems a bit much to say that I was disappointed, but I didn't enjoy House of Windows as much as I'd expected. Maybe it's because Langan's style works better for me in a shorter form, or maybe it's just because this particular story didn't grab me quite as much.

Which isn't to say that there's not a lot to like here. The haunting itself is often marvelously portrayed, and I love the ambivalence and uncertainty of the narrative, especially toward the end. My favorite part, though, comes when Langan drops in a reference to Fritz Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness.

[Leah Bayer · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

I love John Langan, so it pains my heart to give this book anything less than 5 stars. The Fisherman is one of the best horror novels I've ever read, and The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies is a masterclass in short storytelling. House of Windows is an earlier work, and it shows.

The intro mentions that this was originally meant to be a novella, and I think it would have been MUCH more successful in a shorter format. Because Windows' weakness is its length. It just drags on and on, and what could be a tense & tight story ends up being kind of dull. For example: our story focuses on Veronica and Roger, a married couple who are living in a potentially haunted (or sentient?) house. Towards the end of the tale, they go on vacation. We get, like, 30 pages of mundane vacation details that add nothing to the story. Like every single place they eat at and how much ice cream they consumed. Only towards the end of the vacation is there anything relevant to the story (and by that I mean we didn't even get character development, let alone plot--it was irrelevant).

It's just a bloated story. There are the bones of something really great, but it's also a bit more traditional than I thought it would be. Langan is known for creeping, cosmic horror or twists on classic tropes, but there's only a hint of his greatness here. The last section in particular is fantastic: tense, menacing, overwhelming. But this book is over 400 pages (the Goodreads page # is a blatant lie) and only 150 or so of those pages added to the mood.

[Justyn · Rating 1 out of 5]

The best part (and best writing) of this book was the back cover description. As a lover of haunted house and ghost stories, I was excited to read this. The story follows Veronica who tells a writer the story of her marriage leading to the disappearance of her husband Roger. Unfortunately the promising elements of this book suffer from the choice in structure and style. While I think Dickens fans could appreciate the references (as if making references to authors equates this to being literary), the author chose a format which might've worked centuries ago, but doesn't apply to contemporary fiction. The main issue was the vast amount of telling as opposed to showing and the long winded monologue, so I couldn't ever immerse myself into the scenes or care about the characters (aside from my growing indifference and frustration with them). There were also sections which seemed as though it could've been cut, and I found the writer character unnecessary; the reader doesn't even get to know him. This led to a painful reading experience and I even considered abandoning it. I also found Veronica and Roger were stereotypical pretentious academics. While those types exist, they're more the exception. I don't know much about the author, but unlike this self-absorbed effort I've read more engaging and beautiful work from those with English and literature backgrounds Overall, while the writing was decent, and some of the supernatural elements were interesting, House of Windows was a huge disappointment.

[Marie]

Not sure what to make of this book and unfortunately I am having to put it down as a do not finish. It sounded good as it has been on my tbr for awhile, but I could never really get into the story - there is no atmosphere and just could not connect with the characters. Not rating it as it doesn't even deserve one star. Kind of sad in a way as I was hoping for better and all I got was disappointment. :(

[nethescurial · Rating 4 out of 5]

Langan's penchant for nested character-driven narratives in an existential supernatural horror format stretches as far back as his debut. The layered story at the heart of "House of Windows" isn't as structurally accomplished as "The Fisherman", and in some senses it's clearly a debut by an author still finding their footing - Veronica's excess details can venture into fluff, though I do wonder if this is a valid criticism or just an unnecessary feeling on my part; given that this novel has Dickens very openly in its DNA, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a nod to his style, my only problem is I haven't read much Dickens beyond "A Christmas Carol" ages ago so I cannot say, so I will leave that for others more qualified to discuss. But "House of Windows" is overall still a strikingly accomplished work, one that announced Langan as the real deal from the get go, and much like his second full length effort, this is genre fiction at the heights of what it can do within its bounds.

While "The Fisherman" is also immensely metatextual, "House of Windows" leans more toward metafiction outright (though it may not also meet the strictest definition of that term). I say this because of its "protagonist", the unnamed narrator, a horror writer who is a guest at a beach house with family friends. One of these friends is a woman named Veronica who, having been acquainted, tells this narrator the long story of what really happened to her husband Roger, whose disappearance was talk of the town as he and Veronica were the centers of an adultery scandal (committed by Roger), this relayed story spanning a course of two nights. While the long-winded telling of the tale would at first seem superfluous, it is interesting to think about the reason for the way the tale is told (aside from the aforementioned nods to classic writers). The outer narrator (on the margin's of Veronica's inner narration, she being the "true" protagonist of the novel) is a horror writer, and the conceit is established from the get-go with Veronica mentioning that if this protagonist needs material for the horror stories he writes, she can provide him with the story she ends up telling. Is this author an alias for Langan? Either way, it almost creates a feeling of the author speaking through Veronica and like he himself is having a conversation with her. What she tells him is what he then puts to page, as she lampshades at in both the beginning and end of the novels.

Like "The Fisherman", and also like that novel's usage of layered stories and memories to create a vivid and emotional narrative (as well as anchor the usage of these unconventional metatextual techniques), "House of Windows" is heavily in service to Langan's vivacious character writing. Veronica is headstrong and capable woman yet she is set back and dragged down by circumstances beyond her control and the stigma levied against unconventional relationships and does her best to fight what is haunting her marriage, and is still scared through that strength (it is fitting she be the protagonist as Abe is also the protagonist of his novel, both of Langan's longest single works, since they are both his most illustrated, singularly-voiced characters). Roger is an intelligent man with a cold front who deeply represses his emotions and runs from his abusive history while himself coming to slowly embody it, starting with the "curse" he places on his son Ted, who had a tumultuous relationship that then reached a boiling point after the latter arrives one night at the couple's apartment with hateful words and attacks his father. Ted dies in the Iraq War, which leads Roger, unable to escape the weight of the curse, to fall into obsession with reviving his son from the dead or making contact, dragging Veronica into his whirlwind of grief while she must hold on and fight against decades of family trauma and resentment congealing in the form of a vivid, existential ghost story.

Obviously, what Langan is exploring is generational trauma, how untreated trauma and obsession and grief can lead to the dissolution of families even with completely different loved ones involved, or after the dust has settled. Trauma is a slow-acting poison that slinks through the veins and becomes part of the blood after a point, and the only ones who can undo it are the ones whose burden it has been placed unfairly upon. Roger is given this choice, and the entirety of the novel balances on it. The past can close in on us and choke us like the ever-closing and shifting walls of the eldritch Belvedere House (which may have its own conscience, as in "House of Leaves"), with nowhere to go but down. There is hope and healing here, but it only comes after acceptance and atonement, not turning away and sweeping a history of abuse and damage under the rug.

Of course, I also enjoyed the clear enthusiasm for literature and art in this book. Dickens is written in this novel's DNA and into Roger's character, as can also be seen in its themes of parenthood and the chains of the past, and Veronica is a student of Hawthorne, which lends to some of the sense of failed duty and guilt that can be found in both Veronica and Roger's character arcs. Visual art is crucial to this book, as the history of Thomas Belvedere (the house's previous owner) and his dark paintings as well as his relation to an eccentric painter with obtuse metaphysical interests involving geometry and architecture named de Castries (the true nature of whose relationship and motives is left appropriately in the dark for a slow-simmer horror novel). But Langan also isn't afraid to show his influence from pulpier authors either, such as in his clear inspiration from Stephen King's "The Shining", combining a family brimming with tension, the ghosts of the past both literal and figurative, and their entrapment in a home with impossible dimensions. I always admire an artist who wears their heart on their sleeve the way Langan does with both his influence and the actual content of his works and what he is interested in portraying in his stories, and how he is not afraid to acknowledge the importance of more traditional "genre fiction" in his clear influences.

Both "House of Windows" and "The Fisherman" are excellent, but not quite perfect, but this is only exciting, because it may set his third novel up to be his most compelling yet. Not necessarily a fun read - it's slow and dense and concerned very much with what we don't want to have to come to terms with, no matter how strong and steadfast Veronica's narrative voice. But it is one that helps put Langan at the top when it comes to this whole "new wave of weird" thing we have been experiencing in this decade and the previous.

[Richard Gerlach · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Langan is one of my favorite voice in horror literature. He often says that he's too literary for the genre publishers, and too genre for the literary publishers. However, he's just right for me. I will say this novel isn't as good as The Fisherman, but it's still a fantastic read.

This story concerns Veronica, a beautiful grad student in her mid to late 20's, and her husband, an established 65 year old Charles Dickens professor. We find out at the beginning of the novel that he disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Veronica then tells the story from her own perspective. I won't get into spoilers here, but let's say it involves ghostie goos, the Iraq War, family blood lines, and curses. If I were to sum this novel up, it is, if Charles Dickens was a writer in the 21st century, this would be a ghost story by him.

This story bleeds Dickens, Hawthrone, and a little bit of Poe. But, we're talking Langan here, he always bleeds Poe and Lovecraft. It's a deliciously good novel to boot. Langan takes his time introducing us to the characters and the Belvedere house. We fully understand Veronica and her husband, we understand the house and it's history, Langan makes these characters feel alive and fleshes them out. Once in a while, you are reminded that this is a horror novel, and you get an incredibly creepy scene. The haunting and possession are portrayed fantastically creepy and it kept me up late reading.

If you're in the mood for a horror novel, but also feel like reading something that's more on the literary side, check out this book. If you've never read Langan before, check out his short stories or The Fisherman first, I'm not quite sure that this is the best starting place. However, it's a fantastic horror novel, and I recommend it highly.

In summary: Blood and pain, blood and pain, blood pain

[Teo · Rating 2 out of 5]

As other reviewers have pointed out, there's a lot to like in John Langan's debut novel. But unlike his short fiction, "House of Windows" leaves a lot to be desired, too.

We follow a beautiful widow Veronica Croydon as she recounts the story of her older husband Roger's disappearance to a friend and horror writer. Roger, a stubborn but respected college professor has a falling out with his only son after he divorces his wife for his former student, Veronica. In the heat of the moment, he throws a terrible curse at his son Ted. Mere words may prove to have a far more tangible effect when after Ted, a special-ops operative, dies in the Middle East and strange hauntings begin in the couple's home of Belevedere house; a house that also has a shady and possibly dark history.

A lot of promising elements are here - a haunted house, a curse, a mystery, the occult (of the Lovecraftian sort). Langan presents them all with a promise they somehow all tie in together. But only some of the elements are used to any meaningful extent - other's are left unexplained, presented in the form of mental speculation on the narrator's part, never fully woven and connected into the main narrative. Ultimately, it's a few hundred pages of an unlikely couple's day-to-day life interjected with a few descriptions of haunting occurrences. In a word, it's boring, and there's no payoff at the end.

I can't help but feel that in shorter form, this would've been a blast.

To other readers disappointed with "House of Windows", don't dismiss John Langan immediately. Pick up his short fiction, he handles it much, much better. And after all, it's the author's debut novel, and I'm confident follow-ups will be better.

[Steph · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel is supposed to be “tense and frightening.....”. It’s not, really. There are long periods of such triviality that I became very bored. These are interspersed between some delightfully but slightly tense moments that didn’t last long, didn’t ratchet up the horror, or even sustain themselves through the novel. So I had a very difficult time keeping my attention on this storyline, and wanting to finish it.
I wish I hadn’t fallen for the blurb about the novel, and had bought it, now. I prefer to spend our hard-earned money on novels I will reread for years. I doubt I will ever read this novel again, and I’m not entirely sure I will read this author’s other works, either.
This review sums up how I felt quite nicely:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Barely 3 stars, and not really recommended to anyone, even horror novel enthusiasts.

[Anais · Rating 1 out of 5]

I feel that this books suffers from several mistakes often seen in rookies, what was the editor doing? Anyway, it was tedious, extremely so. Considering it was supposed to be a Horror/Gothic story I was extremely disappointed as it just dragged on endlessly on menial details that only slowed down the pace of the story to a crawl. It may have worked as a decent story if at least half of the filler had been removed. And regarding the character narrating the story, ugh, don't even get me started on that. Who even speaks like that when recounting something? It felt very unrealistic and annoying. And I get that the author has a crush on Dickens, but was it really necessary to mention it in almost every page? Hopefully the author will learn from his mistakes and improve the quality of his writing. And change to a more dutiful editor.

[Randy Money · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent merging of Lovecraftian horror with ghost/haunted house story. An aging professor and his young wife deal with a house that isn't quite what it appears, the ghost of his son killed in war, and a sense of large, inimical presences hovering close by. The novel is mainly in the wife's voice and she is not an immediately likable character but if you stick with it, she becomes understandable, her actions not always wise or right, but her courage respectable.

For me, this is one of the sadly undervalued horror novels from the Oughts.

[Jon Recluse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review pending

[Liubov · Rating 3 out of 5]

Modern gothic..

[Edward Champion · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a jaw-droppingly brilliant debut novel from a man who has quickly become one of my favorite cross-genre writers over the last six months. John Langan has thrown in a lot of gothic elements (a little Henry James, a touch of Lovecraft, a perhaps unacknowledged debt to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, some nods to Peter Straub) into a massive blender, but he never loses sight of the fact that this novel is ultimately about a doomed marriage with wildly dysfunctional family elements, albeit through a fascinating narrative filter. Veronica is a college student who marries a sixty-five year old volatile prof named Roger. He is at odds with his son Ted and eventually cuts off ties. And the not so happy couple live in an old house that may or may not be haunted. See, that's what makes Lingan such a fantastically understated writer. We are ostensibly "hearing" this story (the bulk of a novel) within the framework of a story. But is Veronica inventing supernatural elements to contend with the ineffable horrors of her marriage dynamic? Maybe. Maybe not. I also loved Lingan's prose style. He's obviously extremely well-read, but he somehow contorts this influence (much like Paul Tremblay, also a terrific writer working in the same mould) into a highly readable portrait of everyday human behavior. I'm tempted to read this novel a second time at some later point to pay closer attention to Veronica's slips as unreliable narrator. There's also the suggestion that the moribund marriage is also doomed by the constant saturation of culture (both old movies and old literature), suggesting that culture is no panacea for confronting the truth of human pain.

Frankly, it's absolutely criminal that John Langan is not a household name. One rarely comes across a writer who is this nuanced in style and yet so firmly in touch with the strange tics of people. I wish to reiterate that NONE of Langan's genre blending gets in the way of the marriage examination. And the novel is as generous in its answers as it is beguiling in its questions: what I'd like to call the perfect Empsonian formula for enough ambiguity. John Langan is truly a top-tier talent and I plan to read everything this guy has ever written. He's proven to be deeply inspirational to me as I've tried to find my own way to perfect genre fusion with human realism as I've toiled hard and daily on the third season of my audio drama.

[Catharine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first encountered John Langan while reading his book The Fisherman. I was so enthralled by it, I decided to continue reading some of his other works. House of Windows is a horror story unlike most, you aren't entirely sure what you're going to encounter as the story continues...but you also can't put this book down!

John Langan does a wonderful job of sucking you into a story, even topics or activities that might seem mundane in real life, are entirely engrossing as your eyes run across the page. The psychological journey this specific story brings makes you wonder about the world around us. Could something like this happen? HAS something like this happened??

The ending is wonderful, I will not specify more than just saying...it stays with you. I want to know more, I want to ask more questions; I Googled interviews from Langan afterward in hopes of answers to my questions. But alas, the mystery is key and important to this book because sometimes knowing the answers doesn't make things as scary does it ?

A horror thrill that will not jump scare or creep you out with gore...this is in a category of its own and something even scaredy cats (like me) can read at night! You'll love it!

[Matina Kyriazopoulou · Rating 3 out of 5]

Το διάβασα παρά τις προτροπές του συζύγου να το αφήσω αφού με τάραζε ή δεν είναι σπουδαία λογοτεχνία -ούτε αυτός ούτε εγώ "το χουμε" με το παραφυσικό, δε θυμάμαι ποτέ να είδαμε θρίλερ, κι αν είδαμε κοιμόταν!

Not my cup of tea, παρότι ήθελα πραγματικά να μου αρέσει. Για να μην παρεξηγηθώ, απλώς δεν διαβάζω αυτού του είδους βιβλία, οι γνώσεις μου, με ελάχιστες εξαιρέσεις, για τη λογοτεχνία τρόμου είναι ισχνές και δεν μπορώ να αποφανθώ αν όντως έχει επιρροές από Lovecraft κλπ. Δεν είναι πως δεν απόλαυσα την ανάγνωση, είναι σχετικά καλογραμμένο, η πρωτοπρόσωπη αφήγηση βοηθά στην "αναμετάδοση" της σύγχυσης και του αισθήματος τρόμου, και "τρόμαξα" αρκετά, πολύ περισσότερο από ορισμένους άλλους αναγνώστες που εξέφρασαν την άποψη πως περίμεναν κάτι πιο στοιχειωμένο και τρομακτικό. Είναι αυτό που θα έλεγα υπόγεια τρομακτικό, προκαλεί μια αίσθηση ανησυχίας, τύπου "τι στο καλό συμβαίνει;" αλλά μέχρι εκεί. Για όσους έχουν εθιστεί στη λογοτεχνία τρόμου κατανοώ πλήρως πως αυτό δεν είναι αρκετό, για μένα όμως ήταν. Και κυρίως, για μένα ήταν πιο σημαντικά και ενδιαφέροντα τα στοιχεία που φαίνονται βαρετά φυσιολογικά για τους λάτρεις του είδους, όπως η εξέλιξη της σχέσης της Βερόνικα με τον εξαφανισμένο σύζυγό της, η σχέση πατέρα -γιου, η ζωή στο πανεπιστήμιο, το τραύμα της μεγάλης απώλειας που ακολούθησε την 11η Σεπτεμβρίου και οδήγησε στον πόλεμο του Αφγανιστάν.
3/5 λοιπόν!

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, look, me giving a John Langan book a high rating, that's unusual! Wait, that's not it, I meant totally expected. House of Windows is his first novel, but I think the last currently available piece of his work I hadn't yet read. In typical Langan style, the book is thoroughly fleshed out and can get dense at points, and this one referenced a lot of Dickens I've not read (my primary exposure to Dickens thus far is the Muppets Christmas Carol). So, did I miss things, probably? Sure. But it was still an engaging read, with his unusual take on a haunting. Sometimes, it did feel like it was trying to drag just a hair. But otherwise, great book.

[TK · Rating 1 out of 5]

There was no reason to have this framing of a story in a story and sometimes in another story. The character of the author listening to the story adds nothing to the plot. I don’t see why this story couldn’t have been told as it was unfolding.

Aside from way too many mundane details that could have been cut, by having a character tell a story for the entire book felt unnatural. People don’t have that much minute detail packed into whatever they’re telling.

Slogged through it until the end hoping there was a payoff. This book is labeled as a horror but I would not call it that at all

[Waffles · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really liked the author's collection Mr. Gaunt. As a consequence, I had very high expectations for this novel. I was disappointed. This goes to show that novel-length horror is almost an oxymoron. This bokk did not scare me.