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Successful couple's tranquility is disturbed after a hotshot architect builds his first house on the woodsy lot next door and horrible things begin happening to every family that occupies it. Readable haunted house story with a few good ideas and a satisfying ending, but marred throughout by the treacly self-satisfaction of the main characters and its hypocritical gossip-minded sensibility (at one point, our heroine contemptuously dismisses a neighbor who runs into her house to get on the phone with the other hens for a gossip-fest, but we know that's only because, of course, one must settle first into a comfortable chair with a drink in one hand before discussing the embarrassments of one's friends and neighbors). Discussed at length in Stephen King's Danse Macabre and marked by him as a "particularly important" work in the horror genre.
Successful couple's tranquility is disturbed after a hotshot architect builds his first house on the woodsy lot next door and horrible things begin happening to every family that occupies it. Readable haunted house story with a few good ideas and a satisfying ending, but marred throughout by the treacly self-satisfaction of the main characters and its hypocritical gossip-minded sensibility (at one point, our heroine contemptuously dismisses a neighbor who runs into her house to get on the phone with the other hens for a gossip-fest, but we know that's only because, of course, one must settle first into a comfortable chair with a drink in one hand before discussing the embarrassments of one's friends and neighbors). Discussed at length in Stephen King's Danse Macabre and marked by him as a "particularly important" work in the horror genre.