Status Updates From Night Stone

The kind of older horror book I was looking for 😊🍷

This is a gem. I missed Hautala completely, way back when, but I’m thrilled I got steered to this by a reading guide, all these years later; I never would have made time for it. It’s often unsettling - or legit frightening. I’m at probably 4.5 stars, with a decision to round up or down based on the last 85 or so pages. Been a combination of dreadful stuff I did see coming, and totally unexpected scares.

Got a lot done, plan to do a bit more tonight. Someone creased the spine of my copy, horribly, right around the middle of the book - and it’s nice to be past the big fissure almost splitting the poor book in two. And no pages fell out as I dealt with the approaching the fault line. Books always a bit easier to handle after passing a big crease. Okay, well anyway, the novel’s other contents are very entertaining.

It’s pretty darn good. Fits in well with all the stories I’ve read in Spectral Sounds lately, and even a few in the Irish collection I’ve got on the (eternal?) go. This is a distant echo of Nazareth Hill, my favourite Horror novel, but Ramsey Campbell and Hautala do not have similar styles; both of them do up a creepy haunted house, though.

This is going great. But, it looks like I won’t be re-reading Calypso by Ed McBain this month, as part of my 70s reading focus. I forgot I don’t have it anymore! So I’ll pick a different 87th Precinct novel from the 1970s, as my revisit to the series. Whatever - Night Stone, an 80s Horror recommended in 150 Exquisite Horror Books, is a great trip back to a different decade!

A Horror novel that is creepy right from the start is never a bad thing. Gonna use all 592 pages, apparently...

I’m not supposed to be reading this, this month. I’m only supposed to be reading novels from the 1970s. The way around that is to scrap my original plan of one nonfiction book from any decade, and sneak in this. Does it matter exactly how I cheat on my reading plan? Well, I dunno. Maybe I should worry the nonfiction gods will come get me - but I think the nonfiction gods are not nonfiction.