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The Stalker
Deep in the bowels of the dark, desolate warehouse, the terror lay waiting. It had waited for a hundred years. It could wait a few more days. And when the boy came -- so young, so blissfully ignorant of the twisted, dark secrets he disturbed -- it would embrace him with sickening perfume and breathe unspeakable horrors into his ear.
Lewis knew that something in that place wanted him -- wanted to crawl into his mind. It knew his innermost fears and could twist his soul with its demented whispering. But most terrifying of all was that even as he ran screaming from its grasp, he knew he would have to go back...
Lewis knew that something in that place wanted him -- wanted to crawl into his mind. It knew his innermost fears and could twist his soul with its demented whispering. But most terrifying of all was that even as he ran screaming from its grasp, he knew he would have to go back...
334 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1984
3 people are currently reading
131 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
March 29, 2025
A coming-of-age, haunted house story set in an antiquated Milwaukee seed factory. Great characters and equally great scares. The ending got a bit chaotic, but this is an engaging Zebra horror novel. It’s now back in publication courtesy of Macabre Ink/Crossroads Press.
Thank you Julia Teweles for sending me this book for review!
3.5 rounded up to 4.
Thank you Julia Teweles for sending me this book for review!
3.5 rounded up to 4.
January 24, 2021
What could of been a decent little haunted house/factory story sort of falls short of expectations. When a man inherits a seed factory he pulls up ties and moves his family to run it. Odd things start to happen. Not a whole lot, but some. It seems that the first owner of the factory was some what of a prude, and when he finds one of his workers getting frisky with a secretary, he flips his lid. Fast forward 50+ years and the new owners son has a moment of weakness with himself among the bags of seed. That's what sets this all off.
Never read a anti-masturbation ghost story before. With a book like this though, I don't think I'll seek out any more. This also reminds me a lot of "Graveyard Shift" by Stephen King. Just no rats and such.
Never read a anti-masturbation ghost story before. With a book like this though, I don't think I'll seek out any more. This also reminds me a lot of "Graveyard Shift" by Stephen King. Just no rats and such.
January 1, 2020
4.0 stars!
Scariest haunted seed factory ever. Coming of age horror. Dad moves family back to home town for nostalgia, run a antiquated seed factory, raise a family. All the ingredients for a haunted building story in place. Go! Engrossing, fast read. I liked it.
Excellent addition to any Zebra horror collection.
Scariest haunted seed factory ever. Coming of age horror. Dad moves family back to home town for nostalgia, run a antiquated seed factory, raise a family. All the ingredients for a haunted building story in place. Go! Engrossing, fast read. I liked it.
Excellent addition to any Zebra horror collection.
August 19, 2014
It was not an exciting reading, I have to say. I expected something more.
The storyline is a bit blurry. Some passages don't make sense. Possibly due to bad editing. Some episodes which seem relevant to the story are not fully followed up or explained.
The writing is tired and not original. It lacks suspense and credibility. The characters don't reach their full potential and are too up in the air.
The ending is also predictable.
Good for 10-12 years old but not recommended otherwise.
The storyline is a bit blurry. Some passages don't make sense. Possibly due to bad editing. Some episodes which seem relevant to the story are not fully followed up or explained.
The writing is tired and not original. It lacks suspense and credibility. The characters don't reach their full potential and are too up in the air.
The ending is also predictable.
Good for 10-12 years old but not recommended otherwise.
February 15, 2022
Here is proof that Zebra knew what they were doing; emblazoning this cover with a bad ass skeleton to entice readers to grab a copy of The Stalker, even though the book itself is total shit.
In a way, they succeeded. The Stalker had been on my list for quite some time, due to this ridiculously amazing cover, and the fact that I finally found a copy was enough to get me super excited.
Like I said, the plot of The Stalker is absolute garbage. I don't want to give too much away but let's just say that I don't think i've ever read a novel that was so blatantly "anti-masturbation". Yes, I'm not joking when I say that the main idea of this novel is, in essence, a thinly veiled attempt to warn about the dangers of beating your meat.
Honestly, the idea is so bad it's almost good, and had Teweles managed to pull off the concept, I might have been more forgiving in my review. It's just that he failed, monumentally. Everything about this book is awful, from the anti-jerk message, to the execution of plot, character, setting, and eventual climax (ha!), is just lazy and uninventive. 95% of this book takes place in a seed factory for crying out loud (SEED...get it...either that's the most ironic turn of events or Teweles was so against pleasuring yourself he had to to use the euphemism for semen as a setting).
I agree that getting off in the workplace probably isn't the best idea, but do we need a terribly written novel about vengeful ghosts and reanimated industrial equipment to tell us that too?
In a way, they succeeded. The Stalker had been on my list for quite some time, due to this ridiculously amazing cover, and the fact that I finally found a copy was enough to get me super excited.
Like I said, the plot of The Stalker is absolute garbage. I don't want to give too much away but let's just say that I don't think i've ever read a novel that was so blatantly "anti-masturbation". Yes, I'm not joking when I say that the main idea of this novel is, in essence, a thinly veiled attempt to warn about the dangers of beating your meat.
Honestly, the idea is so bad it's almost good, and had Teweles managed to pull off the concept, I might have been more forgiving in my review. It's just that he failed, monumentally. Everything about this book is awful, from the anti-jerk message, to the execution of plot, character, setting, and eventual climax (ha!), is just lazy and uninventive. 95% of this book takes place in a seed factory for crying out loud (SEED...get it...either that's the most ironic turn of events or Teweles was so against pleasuring yourself he had to to use the euphemism for semen as a setting).
I agree that getting off in the workplace probably isn't the best idea, but do we need a terribly written novel about vengeful ghosts and reanimated industrial equipment to tell us that too?
October 17, 2023
When I came across this in a used bookstore, I was sold on the cover art alone. Creepy skeleton with eyeballs and a fright wig?! Zebra Publishing's marketing department certainly knew what they were doing to get people to buy their books. Unfortunately the story itself is just a mess.
The prologue actually starts out as pretty intriguing. An unnamed teenage boy and girl are fleeing from something terrifying, with the boy's catatonic mother propped up in the backseat of the car. I definitely wanted to find out what was back in the factory, what drove them out in a panic.
We then get a flashback to Christmas Eve 1928, where Peter Nagy, the prudish owner of a seed factory, catches his favorite employee fornicating with a woman at the office Christmas party. Nagy's very anti-masturbation and anti-sex, and he loves his dead momma so much that he dresses up in her clothing like Norman Bates. He kills the employee by pushing him down a shaft, because that's a totally logical response. Then he (Nagy) slips and gets buried under six feet of alfalfa seed. The shaft/seed/semen/masturbation theme is pretty heavy in this book.
Decades later, one of his descendants inherits the factory, and of course it's haunted. By the ghost of Nagy? I guess. It wasn't really clear if he's the current source of the evil, or if it's a continuation of something that was always there. The factory was also illegally built on Native American tribal land, because this wouldn't be an 80's horror story without a mysterious Indian curse.
The new owner of the factory has a teenage son who, while taking a break from work, masturbates in the warehouse while thinking about a female employee. Uh oh. Nagy's ghost doesn't like that. Suddenly machinery is coming to life, people and animals are getting murdered, and a bunch of weird random spooky shit happens that doesn't seem to be connected to anything else. That's where the story falls apart. The father becomes very violent toward his son, there's tons of homophobia, and I literally never figured out who is "The Stalker" and what the hell "mind-trap" means in the context of the story. Something about feeding on fear?
The dad also likes to bark like a dog at random children, as a joke. Weird.
I honestly have no idea what is happening in the last 1/4 of the book. The son's girlfriend coerces him to have sex with her in the factory at night, which unleashes hallucinations of snakes and explosions and blue/white lights, and then they find they're lying atop the skeleton of the old murdered factory worker but they're oddly nonchalant about it. Later the mother's diary randomly teleports from her home to the factory, for presumably no reason other than to freak out the father, then it is never mentioned again. Father's wallet lights itself on fire, also for no explained reason. The son finds Nagy's ring and wears it occasionally, but it's unclear if this ring has any supernatural power although it does disturb an employee.
I know, this makes no sense. None of it is connected. The story is a mess.
There are trace elements of Stephen King short stories here, as well as The Shining (I kept expecting the father to scream "Come and take your medicine!" at the son) and Carrie (which is actually referenced) but, you know, not the good parts. And a nod to Psycho about dressing up in Mother's clothes. It's clear Claude Teweles read good horror but couldn't write it.
I'd avoid this one unless you collect books specifically for the cover art.
The prologue actually starts out as pretty intriguing. An unnamed teenage boy and girl are fleeing from something terrifying, with the boy's catatonic mother propped up in the backseat of the car. I definitely wanted to find out what was back in the factory, what drove them out in a panic.
We then get a flashback to Christmas Eve 1928, where Peter Nagy, the prudish owner of a seed factory, catches his favorite employee fornicating with a woman at the office Christmas party. Nagy's very anti-masturbation and anti-sex, and he loves his dead momma so much that he dresses up in her clothing like Norman Bates. He kills the employee by pushing him down a shaft, because that's a totally logical response. Then he (Nagy) slips and gets buried under six feet of alfalfa seed. The shaft/seed/semen/masturbation theme is pretty heavy in this book.
Decades later, one of his descendants inherits the factory, and of course it's haunted. By the ghost of Nagy? I guess. It wasn't really clear if he's the current source of the evil, or if it's a continuation of something that was always there. The factory was also illegally built on Native American tribal land, because this wouldn't be an 80's horror story without a mysterious Indian curse.
The new owner of the factory has a teenage son who, while taking a break from work, masturbates in the warehouse while thinking about a female employee. Uh oh. Nagy's ghost doesn't like that. Suddenly machinery is coming to life, people and animals are getting murdered, and a bunch of weird random spooky shit happens that doesn't seem to be connected to anything else. That's where the story falls apart. The father becomes very violent toward his son, there's tons of homophobia, and I literally never figured out who is "The Stalker" and what the hell "mind-trap" means in the context of the story. Something about feeding on fear?
The dad also likes to bark like a dog at random children, as a joke. Weird.
I honestly have no idea what is happening in the last 1/4 of the book. The son's girlfriend coerces him to have sex with her in the factory at night, which unleashes hallucinations of snakes and explosions and blue/white lights, and then they find they're lying atop the skeleton of the old murdered factory worker but they're oddly nonchalant about it. Later the mother's diary randomly teleports from her home to the factory, for presumably no reason other than to freak out the father, then it is never mentioned again. Father's wallet lights itself on fire, also for no explained reason. The son finds Nagy's ring and wears it occasionally, but it's unclear if this ring has any supernatural power although it does disturb an employee.
I know, this makes no sense. None of it is connected. The story is a mess.
There are trace elements of Stephen King short stories here, as well as The Shining (I kept expecting the father to scream "Come and take your medicine!" at the son) and Carrie (which is actually referenced) but, you know, not the good parts. And a nod to Psycho about dressing up in Mother's clothes. It's clear Claude Teweles read good horror but couldn't write it.
I'd avoid this one unless you collect books specifically for the cover art.
August 31, 2025
The Stalker is Julia Teweles's first book, and it definitely has first book flaws: the pace is uneven, the characters aren't particularly well developed, and the climax doesn't make much sense. It's also weirdly simultaneously obsessed with and repulsed by male sexuality.
That being said, it is so very much a typical example of 80s' mass market horror that it's almost impossible not to have some measure of affection for it. People looking for a deep, truly scary read won't find it here, but those with a fondness for the type of books featured in Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction will enjoy it as a bit of pulpy nostalgia.
I received a free copy from Crossroad Press.
That being said, it is so very much a typical example of 80s' mass market horror that it's almost impossible not to have some measure of affection for it. People looking for a deep, truly scary read won't find it here, but those with a fondness for the type of books featured in Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction will enjoy it as a bit of pulpy nostalgia.
I received a free copy from Crossroad Press.
November 20, 2019
Based on the cover, I was expecting this to be more ridiculous rather than the very competent ghost story I ended up with. The book surprisingly balances characters and horror without either feeling like they overshadow the other.
The book had several spelling errors and a few things are brought up multiple times but don’t amount to much. Despite this, it was entertaining the whole way through and actually creepy. Not at all what I expected from the unintentionally hilarious cover art.
The book had several spelling errors and a few things are brought up multiple times but don’t amount to much. Despite this, it was entertaining the whole way through and actually creepy. Not at all what I expected from the unintentionally hilarious cover art.
May 5, 2022
I first read this as a teenager and then later as an adult (jump ahead roughly 30 years). Still the same so bad it's good kinda feel. Prudish vengeful ghosts? Cross dressing? Weird indigenous curses? Yeah! Ending is maybe a tad on the weak side and the pacing(given all that it's trying to tell) seems choppy. But is it still fun? Definitely.
June 23, 2017
It sustains itself within its chosen genre.
March 17, 2023
An interesting little horror novel that feels deeply beholden to Stephen King, nonetheless this was pleasantly depraved and psychological.
December 29, 2023
This book was pretty good. It was a bit of a slow burn but it really picked up in the last few chapters and the ending was great. I look forward to checking out more of his work.
December 25, 2023
What a fun haunted house story! I found this at my local library sale and picked it up solely based on the cover. I wasn't expecting much due to low reviews, but I really enjoyed this. I admit it got a little silly at times, but all in all it was enjoyable.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews