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The Owlsfane Horror
Owlsfane: a quiet, quaint Vermont village...a doorway into a winter wonderland of pristine ski trails, pine-scented woods, and peace. A place where city pressures evaporate under crystalline skies.
For Sandy Horne, it was an innocent destination. A place where she and David could share a week of adventure and love. Then she was thrust through a doorway in time...plunged into a world of dark, ultimate terror...claimed mind, body, and soul by...The Owlsfane Horror!
For Sandy Horne, it was an innocent destination. A place where she and David could share a week of adventure and love. Then she was thrust through a doorway in time...plunged into a world of dark, ultimate terror...claimed mind, body, and soul by...The Owlsfane Horror!
480 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
September 28, 2025
Great cover, but lame book about skiers with skin conditions.
October 5, 2023
When my wife announced we were going skiing with friends this Christmas in Colorado, I confess to having a moment of terror. Ironically, I was in the middle of reading "The Owlsfane Horror," which is also about a Christmas vacation on the ski slopes. Reading this book did not help me look forward to my trip.
Now granted, I've only been skiing once. I was living in Missouri at the time, and there was a place you could go skiing or snowboarding in that not-very-mountainous state when the winters were sufficiently cold and snowy. I'm a southern boy and had never been skiing on anything but UNFROZEN water. So I took the bunny slope while my friends all galavanted off to more challenging territory. It was just me and what seemed like hundreds of little Ewoks, who flew around me as gracefully as mosquitoes while I desperately tried to keep my balance. All these damn children had flattened the course to the point where there was no actual powder, so I felt more like I was skating than skiing. Just when I felt I was getting the hang of it, clipping along for a few seconds at a nice pace, here comes some little turd right in my path. "Get out of the way!" I'd scream, terrifying the poor girl or boy so that they'd fall and I'd go catapulting over them in a spray of wet ice. My friends found me at the bar a few hours later, nursing a hot chocolate and my injured pride.
So though I can't say I like skiing, one thing I do like is haunted house stories. "The Owlsfane Horror" combines both, because unlike me, author Duffy Stein evidently loved the sport. The novel is set in a real ski lodge and historic home in Vermont where the author had actually visited, though she is careful to say that none of the events of the story actually happened... but they COULD have....
Enter Sandy and her preppie fiance David, who drags her to the resort town of Owlsfane to show off--er, I mean, to teach her how to ski. It must be true love, because she'd much rather be spending her vacation on a warm beach doing nothing athletic at all. I'm with you, girl!
Turns out that one of the draws of this particular little spot are the haunted house and cemetery the next door. The house used to belong to a wealthy local who accidentally buried his daughter alive in the family mausoleum.
The owner of the ski lodge is a guy named Bob. You knew there had to be a "Bob" in an Eighties Paperback From Hell! This particular Bob has all the ghost stories memorized for each season of new guests, so the novel kicks off with some fireside exposition from Bob straight out of the films "Friday the 13th Part 2" and "Madman."
After hearing Bob's story, Sandy is intrigued. She decides to go exploring the haunted house. It's a bad idea. Turns out, Sandy is the spitting image of the daughter who had been buried alive, and so her presence has captured the attention of the resident ghost who is still grieving the death of his daughter after all these years. Now, it is not so much the house that is haunted, but Sandy herself.
Okay, so the spooky backstory is pretty good, if not a bit of a cliché, but does the rest of the novel hold up? Not so much.
My biggest problem with the novel concerned the characters. I do not mind books with an ensemble cast, as long as most are fleshed out personalities. But aside from Sandy, most of the people we meet are rather wooden. There's also not one, not two, but three annoying child characters. The author tries to add a little color to everyone by having them engage in endless banter early on. Unfortunately, none of them have very interesting things to say. Dialogue consists mostly of smartass, snarky comments.
Nor are the pages packed with what you've come to love pulp paperbacks for. There's some sex and violence, but it is of the vanilla variety. Nothing too over-the-top for the squeamish. Most of the book features our heroine having nightmares and premonitions and sleepwalking episodes. She also starts developing idiopathic rashes on her arms that are reminiscent of burns, while her boyfriend, a psychiatrist, and local doctors try to figure out what her problem is. The plot gets a little repetitious and padded out to the point of being boring. In fact, it took me a while to read this one, because I had to walk away from it for a few weeks to finish it.
Still, I couldn't get too mad at it. It did have some effective chills and the writing was able to evoke the intended atmosphere and mental images to make for a fairly engaging experience. Overall, I'd say this book may appeal to some fans of vintage horrors as a fairly fun little romp for both the Halloween and Christmas seasons.
And hey, if you decide to read this, you'll have to get the out-of-print paperback which features a classic step-back cover design with a woman, presumably buried alive, clawing her way out of the pages. I really do miss the days when buying a book off the shelves was truly browsing through works of art. That's why I still read these things, folks.
Anyway, I expect my own ski-trip this Christmas will be much scarier than this book. Wish me luck, everyone!
SCORE: 2 broken skis out of 5
WORD OF THE DAY: Effulgence
Now granted, I've only been skiing once. I was living in Missouri at the time, and there was a place you could go skiing or snowboarding in that not-very-mountainous state when the winters were sufficiently cold and snowy. I'm a southern boy and had never been skiing on anything but UNFROZEN water. So I took the bunny slope while my friends all galavanted off to more challenging territory. It was just me and what seemed like hundreds of little Ewoks, who flew around me as gracefully as mosquitoes while I desperately tried to keep my balance. All these damn children had flattened the course to the point where there was no actual powder, so I felt more like I was skating than skiing. Just when I felt I was getting the hang of it, clipping along for a few seconds at a nice pace, here comes some little turd right in my path. "Get out of the way!" I'd scream, terrifying the poor girl or boy so that they'd fall and I'd go catapulting over them in a spray of wet ice. My friends found me at the bar a few hours later, nursing a hot chocolate and my injured pride.
So though I can't say I like skiing, one thing I do like is haunted house stories. "The Owlsfane Horror" combines both, because unlike me, author Duffy Stein evidently loved the sport. The novel is set in a real ski lodge and historic home in Vermont where the author had actually visited, though she is careful to say that none of the events of the story actually happened... but they COULD have....
Enter Sandy and her preppie fiance David, who drags her to the resort town of Owlsfane to show off--er, I mean, to teach her how to ski. It must be true love, because she'd much rather be spending her vacation on a warm beach doing nothing athletic at all. I'm with you, girl!
Turns out that one of the draws of this particular little spot are the haunted house and cemetery the next door. The house used to belong to a wealthy local who accidentally buried his daughter alive in the family mausoleum.
The owner of the ski lodge is a guy named Bob. You knew there had to be a "Bob" in an Eighties Paperback From Hell! This particular Bob has all the ghost stories memorized for each season of new guests, so the novel kicks off with some fireside exposition from Bob straight out of the films "Friday the 13th Part 2" and "Madman."
After hearing Bob's story, Sandy is intrigued. She decides to go exploring the haunted house. It's a bad idea. Turns out, Sandy is the spitting image of the daughter who had been buried alive, and so her presence has captured the attention of the resident ghost who is still grieving the death of his daughter after all these years. Now, it is not so much the house that is haunted, but Sandy herself.
Okay, so the spooky backstory is pretty good, if not a bit of a cliché, but does the rest of the novel hold up? Not so much.
My biggest problem with the novel concerned the characters. I do not mind books with an ensemble cast, as long as most are fleshed out personalities. But aside from Sandy, most of the people we meet are rather wooden. There's also not one, not two, but three annoying child characters. The author tries to add a little color to everyone by having them engage in endless banter early on. Unfortunately, none of them have very interesting things to say. Dialogue consists mostly of smartass, snarky comments.
Nor are the pages packed with what you've come to love pulp paperbacks for. There's some sex and violence, but it is of the vanilla variety. Nothing too over-the-top for the squeamish. Most of the book features our heroine having nightmares and premonitions and sleepwalking episodes. She also starts developing idiopathic rashes on her arms that are reminiscent of burns, while her boyfriend, a psychiatrist, and local doctors try to figure out what her problem is. The plot gets a little repetitious and padded out to the point of being boring. In fact, it took me a while to read this one, because I had to walk away from it for a few weeks to finish it.
Still, I couldn't get too mad at it. It did have some effective chills and the writing was able to evoke the intended atmosphere and mental images to make for a fairly engaging experience. Overall, I'd say this book may appeal to some fans of vintage horrors as a fairly fun little romp for both the Halloween and Christmas seasons.
And hey, if you decide to read this, you'll have to get the out-of-print paperback which features a classic step-back cover design with a woman, presumably buried alive, clawing her way out of the pages. I really do miss the days when buying a book off the shelves was truly browsing through works of art. That's why I still read these things, folks.
Anyway, I expect my own ski-trip this Christmas will be much scarier than this book. Wish me luck, everyone!
SCORE: 2 broken skis out of 5
WORD OF THE DAY: Effulgence
January 17, 2017
Due to my love of hokey B-grade horror stories, combined with my fondness for reading books that are obscure and almost forgotten (and usually there's a reason for that), when I came across a description of this book, I immediately thought, "I have to read this! I know it will probably be awful but then I can pretend I sought it out as a public service, to warn other readers from the perils of my mistake." And thanks to the Internet, for a dollar plus shipping, I managed to get a copy from a novelty shop in North Carolina, which included a peppermint with my package. (In case anyone is wondering, I did not eat the peppermint.)
Maybe I should talk about the book now, but I find myself toobored horrified to want to discuss it. But here goes...a bland young couple from the big city, David and Sandy, go to a ski house in the fictitious town of Owlsfane, Vermont, for a week of winter fun. Their first night there, the owner of the house tells a ghost story about the old mansion next door. Apparently the man who built it, Eben Wallford, accidentally buried his daughter, Suzanne, alive, and was so wracked with guilt that he has been unable to pass over. Instead, he decides to use Sandy as a conduit for bringing Suzanne back from the grave.
Honestly, this could have been a good tale, in a hokey, B-grade horror sort of way, but it was suffocated by the the weight of all the superfluous characters, repetitive and/or unnecessary details, and the sheer length of the book, which outlasted its welcome by at least 100 pages. Not only are there a lot of characters, but they all love to talk amongst themselves. There's a whole chapter where David's ex-girlfriend shows up, tells him she still has the hots for him, and then leaves because he says he loves Sandy. I'm not sure what that was supposed to accomplish--to show us that all of David's girlfriends are boring? There's a scene of Sandy being hypnotized that could have been good, but the author had to hypnotize her two additional times, when once would have packed more of a wallop. Stuff like that kept bogging the story down to a two-star read.
On a more positive note, the writing itself is fine, for the most part, and the first half of the book was actually not bad at all. Not to mention, it was a real blast from the past reading about the bygone era of 1981, when people went to discos, ate fondue, and let young children play outside unsupervised at all hours of the day and night in subzero temperatures. I kept waiting for someone to pop some music in their 8-track player, but alas, that never happened.
Final impressions:
Scary? No. Don't be fooled by the title, there's no "horror" here.
Characters? Meh.
Sex and violence? Barely PG. The squeamish can read without fear.
Readable? Just barely.
Worth a dollar plus shipping? Sure, why not?
Maybe I should talk about the book now, but I find myself too
Honestly, this could have been a good tale, in a hokey, B-grade horror sort of way, but it was suffocated by the the weight of all the superfluous characters, repetitive and/or unnecessary details, and the sheer length of the book, which outlasted its welcome by at least 100 pages. Not only are there a lot of characters, but they all love to talk amongst themselves. There's a whole chapter where David's ex-girlfriend shows up, tells him she still has the hots for him, and then leaves because he says he loves Sandy. I'm not sure what that was supposed to accomplish--to show us that all of David's girlfriends are boring? There's a scene of Sandy being hypnotized that could have been good, but the author had to hypnotize her two additional times, when once would have packed more of a wallop. Stuff like that kept bogging the story down to a two-star read.
On a more positive note, the writing itself is fine, for the most part, and the first half of the book was actually not bad at all. Not to mention, it was a real blast from the past reading about the bygone era of 1981, when people went to discos, ate fondue, and let young children play outside unsupervised at all hours of the day and night in subzero temperatures. I kept waiting for someone to pop some music in their 8-track player, but alas, that never happened.
Final impressions:
Scary? No. Don't be fooled by the title, there's no "horror" here.
Characters? Meh.
Sex and violence? Barely PG. The squeamish can read without fear.
Readable? Just barely.
Worth a dollar plus shipping? Sure, why not?
July 9, 2019
While the cover blurb announced this as the next best thing since the Exorcist and Sybil, I have to differ. This is basically a grade B haunted house/ghost story set in a ski town in Vermont. Decently written, a little too much drama and the ending was rather abrupt.
January 15, 2019
DNF @ Page 100 or thereabouts.
A boringly written novel in which little happens — at least to the point at which I gave up. I don’t care to trudge through another 400 pages with characters I don’t care about. Haunted house novels are either really good or really poor . . . this falls into the latter category. The Stephen King references made me wonder why I wasn’t reading better horror.
The only thing this rightfully obscure book has going for it is its wicked cool cover art.
A boringly written novel in which little happens — at least to the point at which I gave up. I don’t care to trudge through another 400 pages with characters I don’t care about. Haunted house novels are either really good or really poor . . . this falls into the latter category. The Stephen King references made me wonder why I wasn’t reading better horror.
The only thing this rightfully obscure book has going for it is its wicked cool cover art.
June 2, 2024
The cover art is the only thing going for this book. I rarely review books halfway through, but I'm 250 pages into this nearly 500-page tome and NOTHING HAS HAPPENED YET. It started off okay - the characters are bland, dull, and interchangeable, but the spooky atmosphere and suspense of this haunted house builds nicely...and then doesn't pay off. We move on to another scene where the suspense builds...and then nothing happens. Again and again, rinse and repeat, I'm bored. A running theme in this book is that the ghost keeps making "appearances" but hasn't actually done anything except make people feel cold. Sorry but I need more action in my horror stories.
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December 6, 2020
The Owlsfane Daytime Soap Opera With Mild Supernatural Elements would be a more accurate title. Truly one of the most boring horror novels I've ever read. Like everyone else who has had the misfortune of reading this book, I was lured in by the cover, which is pretty much the only thing that this has going for it.
January 15, 2020
not a very exciting book, not much goes on. I have read a different book by this author, and it was great! Took me 2 months to read this, i just couldn't get into it.
June 13, 2022
Nothing spectacular, but satisfying enough for readers who enjoy this type of psuedo-horror haunted house story.
July 4, 2024
This was a better book than I was expecting it to be from the reviews I read.
A good creepy story with shades of Audrey Rose and Amityville Horror ( they even get a mention)
A good creepy story with shades of Audrey Rose and Amityville Horror ( they even get a mention)
January 18, 2025
2.4
If this hadn't been loaned to me by my mom, I'd have given it a big fat dnf
If this hadn't been loaned to me by my mom, I'd have given it a big fat dnf
December 26, 2022
A distinctly mediocre ghost story where very little happens. Unless I missed something, the bit about them finding a bricked-up tunnel in the basement played no role in the story and was never brought up again. There was one dream sequence that had some mildly interesting imagery, but didn't really factor into the story at all; that was about the only time the book really approached horror. Otherwise, this an utterly tedious book about interpersonal relationships, a topic that doesn't interest me in the least. 1.5 stars, rounded up because it has a good cover and I liked the setting.
May 24, 2019
Great ghost story!
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews