Conversations - The Book Graveyard

Eric collaborates with Nick from The Book Graveyard BookTube channel to review the 1971 gothic paperback The Shadow Guest. They also explore the gothic paperback scene of the 1960s–80s, focusing on its mix of supernatural and mystery elements. The discussion is available as a podcast and as a video on The Book Graveyard channel HERE.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
All right, welcome, welcome everyone, Welcome back, Welcome back to
the book Graveyard. We have a special guest on today.
You've seen him before, you know him, and you love him.
Eric from The Paperback Warrior.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Thanks Nick, thanks for having me on here. I really
appreciate it. It's awesome. That's awesome to be back here.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
No problem. We're very glad to have you back. So
I have been yacking about Gothic mysteries a lot lately,
and Eric asked me if I wanted to co read
and review a book, and we looked for one we
both had and we chose this here of the shadow

(00:47):
guest by Hillary Woe is how you say that?

Speaker 2 (00:52):
Wall? Hillary Wall?

Speaker 1 (00:53):
Hillary Wall?

Speaker 2 (00:55):
Yep, that's that's a nice edition of that. It's really nice.
It's crispy, Yeah, it is.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
It is crispy.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
Three dollars man.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
So, if you're if you're new here, maybe you saw
the thumbnail. Maybe you're like, oh, well, there's someone's talking
about these gothic Gothic romance, Gothic mystery, Gothic suspense books
that my grandma used to read. And you click on
this video and you're like, why are these two middle
aged guys sitting here talking about Gothics. Who are these guys?

(01:32):
So I thought, you know, in case they're new here,
we might explain who we are, and so feel free
to let us know who you are and what you're
all about.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
There, Eric, all right, So I run the Paperback Warrior
dot com blog and I've got about fifteen hundred reviews
of the vintage fiction. We dig into paperbacks, hardcovers, comics,
pulp magazines, you name it, we've got it. And we
also do a podcast. I think I'm up to episode

(02:04):
two this week of the podcast, same thing. We do
features and reviews of vintage fiction, trying to track down
authors and trying to learn more about their lives, what
lives they led. Typically it always leads to war records,
how they served in World War One or World War Two,
sometimes in Korea, but it seems to always find its

(02:26):
way back into military records of some kind. So the
podcast digs into their literary work, but also their personal
lives as well, which I find fascinating. And then I'm
on all the social media channels TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, x threads, Pinterest,
whatever you're down with, I'm normally there. Whatever your stomping
ground is you'll find me typically do maybe one or

(02:51):
two podcast a month, and then the YouTube videos. I'm
always throwing shorts up there on YouTube, so you'll find
new shorts just about every day, just about a book
or comic book or magazine something like that. So that's
that's my that's my spill.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
That's good. I would also like to point out to
listeners that when Eric says he talks about the authors
in the bido, he actually does research. He doesn't just
look at Wikipedia and repeat it. He hunts down family
members of these these authors that have passed and and
ask gets to act direct questions that you will not

(03:32):
find anywhere else.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
Yeah, I'm trying to find one now I'm working on.
He served in World War Two. He earned two purple hearts,
and he ended up being injured so bad in the
war that he was confined to a hospital bed for
two years. And while he was confined to the hospital,
he started writing as a form of therapy. He had
nowhere to go, no one to see, so he just

(03:55):
started writing. And he was inspired by the The Dime
Detective novels that that people were gifting him, or I
think they found at the hospital. So he just started
writing as a form of therapy. But then, from what
I can sell, he mysteriously dies in like nineteen thirty four,
and I don't know how he died, so I'm trying
to figure it out some once I track down his relatives,
his grandkids, is trying to find the story. So that's

(04:16):
the kind of stuff that we get into.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
Yeah, that's incredible. That's some hard work.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
It's a lot of fun, man, it really is. No.

Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah, I mean it's like you're an actual investigator.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yes, that's right. I'm a underpaid investigator spending a lot
of my time that I should be working and making
a living doing things like this.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
But yeah, I mean, isn't that that's tip for TA,
like the classic private investigator, underpaid. They're having a rough.

Speaker 2 (04:44):
Time, that's right. But it's interesting. You know, we're talking
about the Gothics. I didn't know. I didn't know anything
about Gothics, like probably like maybe five six years ago.
I had no earthly idea what a Gothic was. And I, again,
like what you said earlier, I thought it was just
something that our you know, grand my grandmother read or
something like that. Itar typically has a woman in scantily

(05:07):
clad clothes, you know, running from some huge house or whatever.
But but you've covered on your channel obviously you do
a lot of vintage refuse and stuff like that. You've
covered what are two gothics on there, haven't you?

Speaker 1 (05:20):
Yes? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was. Uh, I forget how
I found out about them. I think it was on
Instagram and I just saw people they just keep posting
them and uh, but no one would ever talk about them.
And then I don't remember if I heard you start
talking about them first or if I just started reading

(05:40):
one because I was like, I was curious. You know,
everyone just talks about the cover and how great they look.
I should have grabbed some.

Speaker 2 (05:48):
That's great.

Speaker 1 (05:48):
Yeah, and uh.

Speaker 2 (05:50):
Soulder, you might be able to see that's my whole
shelf there. Well yeah, they're uh yeah, they all they
all look really identical. You know, they've got the one
light on and in the house and the woman running
from the mansion or the estate.

Speaker 1 (06:03):
I mean they're wonderful. They're dramatic and they're spooky. Yeah,
and you do you want to know what does she run?
You know, what's she running from? Why is that light on?

Speaker 2 (06:15):
Yeah? Exactly, And a lot of you know, people aren't
really familiar with Gothics. A lot of really famous writers
wrote Gothics at the end of their career. You could
look like somebody like Gil Brewer, for example, who was
kind of struggling at the end of his career both
personally and professionally, and you know, turned to Gothics as
a way to earn money. It was. It was a

(06:36):
huge marketed paperback industry from like the late sixties. The
seventies were the prime time for Gothics, and then even
into the eighties. There were some Gothics even in the
early nineties, but like Irving Greenfield for example, Gil Brewer,
who we're talking about today, Hillary wall who was a
tremendously successful author, but at the tail end of his career,

(06:58):
it's got to make money, right and that that was
the big market was doing the Gothics, and most of
the authors they still wanted to save a little face
from putting their name out there on them, so they
use pseudonyms to write them, typically a woman's name. But
they did it, and they earned paychecks.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
I would I would assume that because the the market
was targeted at women, that that's probably also why they
used female pseudonyms.

Speaker 2 (07:24):
Exactly.

Speaker 1 (07:25):
Yes, I was really surprised. I was really surprised to
find out that how many of the authors were males. Like,
like even because you see all the names, you see
all the author names, and they're all they're all female.
I don't I don't know if I've ever seen one
that was like obviously a male name. There's initials on

(07:48):
some of them, so it could be yeah, yeah, but
it's never like Ted Johnson.

Speaker 2 (07:54):
Yeah, off the top of my head, I can't think
of any. Uh, it's really interesting when you find you
just covered one recently, but like you look at some
of like John Messman, who wrote all these hard hitting
action adventure novels like like Jefferson Boone, Handy Man, and
The Revenger, and then he also wrote the Trailsman Western series,
which he created where the you know, dominant male hero

(08:16):
got laid three times in the book and then you
turn around you're like, wait a minute, this guy wrote
Gothics and he and he did he wrote him under
the name Charlotte, Charlotte Nicole I think is what it was. Yeah, yeah,
Charlotte Nicole, and he wrote he wrote several and then
they're all they're all pretty good from what I read,
he really told the story.

Speaker 1 (08:36):
They are and it's interesting to see him write from
being a male to write as the female protagonist, like
the inner thoughts of the female. It's amusing at some points.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
Yeah, it's I just can't imagine switching gears like that
from someone like sky Fargo, who's just so he's just
so dominating and you know, and switching over to a
vulnerable female who's questioning, you know, what's happening in her life.
Typically she's just gotten married, so she's suspecting that her
husband is doing something wrong, or someone's gonna steal money

(09:11):
from her inheritance or whatever it might be. It's just
such a weird, such a weird style clash.

Speaker 1 (09:17):
It's very different because the Gothic is very psychological, you know,
and it's and it's and it's based on what maybe
are more like a feminine fears, So it is very weird.
Definitely would be like, oh.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
I got this, Yeah it's and it really has fascinating me.
And there's so many Gothics, Like if you go down
the Gothic rabbit hole, you'll you'll find thousands. It seems
like there's thousands of paperbacks and maybe someone out there
and some and in some someday we'll do like a
Paperbacks from Hell type of thing with gothics and just

(09:49):
catalog them all and try to figure out who's who.

Speaker 1 (09:52):
I'm surprised that one doesn't exist already. Maybe we should
write it. Maybe we'll get it together on the look
out from that.

Speaker 2 (10:05):
I like it. I like it. It's a lot of scanning,
a lot of scanning.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
It's a lot of scanning. You shouldn't have sold those books.

Speaker 2 (10:12):
Man, I know, right, it's not got all my gothics
though I probably have maybe two hun gothics.

Speaker 1 (10:19):
Oh yeah, I love that you that's the ones you
held on too.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
Yeah, I just I can't give up those covers for
some reason. I don't know why.

Speaker 1 (10:26):
Romantic it's romantically beautiful.

Speaker 2 (10:29):
Yeah it is. But yeah, the I'm sorry I interrupted you.
You were probably gonna tell a lot of viewers about
your channel.

Speaker 1 (10:40):
Oh that was like twenty minutes ago, right, No, no, yeah,
So the book Grave is just a it's it's mostly
a YouTube channel. I had the blog. I don't know
if I'm gonna keep doing it, but so I just
talk about vintage genre fiction, uh, trying to cover all

(11:02):
the genres and subgenres. Usually the schlockier the better, the
more b movie the better. It's a little less in
depth than the paperback Warrior and uh, a little looser,
a little little goofy, and I'm more uh not more entertaining.

(11:23):
You're very entertaining. I mean, here's educational.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
Yeah. I try to bring a little bit more of
a scholarly approach to some of the stuff.

Speaker 1 (11:34):
But thank you.

Speaker 2 (11:35):
Just but yeah, you're your channel's hilarious, especially with the ebes.
I like watching that stuff. It's it's great.

Speaker 1 (11:41):
Yeah, we like to to make a fool of ourselves.
That's what we do around here.

Speaker 2 (11:46):
Yeah, it's it's it's great. You guys are doing great work.

Speaker 1 (11:50):
Thank you, Thank you. All right, man, you're ready to
dig into this here shadow guest. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:57):
Man, do you want me to just kind of set
the table on who Hillary Wall is? Yes?

Speaker 1 (12:00):
Yes, please please do.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
Yeah. So Hillary Wall, I've been really fascinated with him
as and it is a male author. Oddly enough, his
name's Hillary, which kind of weird, But I've been really
fascinated with him. I did a podcast episode on his
life in literary work, episode number one hundred and three
back in August twenty twenty four if you can see that.
But that's the that's the episode, but up until the

(12:27):
Shadow guests. The only other Wall books that I've read
is his police procedural series, which stars it's a Connecticut
police chief named Fred Fellows. They're marvelous police procedural books.
I really enjoyed those a lot, and I reviewed a
couple of those on the blog. But the quick backstory
on Hillary Wall was he was born in nineteen twenty.

(12:48):
He was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He majored in
art at Yale, and then he had listened into the
US Navy. During his time in the service, he wrote
his first book, which happens a lot of times with
some of these authors. They always seem like they are
writing while they're in service. I guess they just find
the time to do that. His first book was called
Madam Will Not Dine Tonight. I was published in hardcover

(13:11):
in nineteen forty seven, so we're going way way back.
Earlier in his career, he appeared in Argacy magazine, but
he broke into the police procedural styled storytelling after reading
he was reading a true crime book by a guy
named Charles Boswell, and this was I believe in nineteen
forty nine. So he's reading this true crime book and

(13:31):
I think it was about twelve ten or twelve different murders,
and the book just inspired him to write police procedural
books about how homicide investigations work, but putting them into
a fictional setting. So his first police procedural novel was
called Last Scene Wearing, and it just catapulted his career.

(13:52):
He started writing standalone novels and then he developed the
Fred Fellows series, which ran eleven books. But Hillary Wall
he had published. He was published in like the slick
magazines if you know what I'm talking about, like Cosmopolitan
for example, which was you know, the bigger paycheck. You know,
that's the poor exposure. And he would say a little
bit more of a high brow, you know, readership. He

(14:15):
was in the mystery magazines like Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen.
Really immensely popular guy. And the prime of his career
was the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties. And just like
what we talked about earlier, after having so many successful
books and you know, in selling in the millions, his
career starts to dwindle down. And he's starting to look

(14:36):
and say, hey, you know what am I going to
write now? Like I've already wrote homicide stuff, I've already
written action adventure, I've written mysteries. You know, where do
we go from here to earn a book? And just
like you know who talked about earlier, Gil Brewer, Messman
eerv In Greenfield, it was just a matter of time
before Hillary Waller jumped into the gothic marketplace. So by
the nineteen seventies he's writing these gothic romance papers for

(15:00):
publishers like Dell. And he used the name and I
may be saying this wrong, but it's Alyssa E l
I s s A Elissa Grado or g r A
d O w e R. So if you're looking for
Hillary Walls gothics, you're gonna find them, typically under that
name Alissa Grador. But some of the just to kind

(15:21):
of give an ideas, some of the gothics he wrote
under that name. Uh, he did Summer at Ravens Roost,
Seaview manor The Secret Room of more Gatehouse. You can
tell those titles just wreak, you know, Gothic romance. But
and I think you'll probably agree this Shadow guests, you know,
at least in my opinion, it's just a little bit different.

(15:44):
It's written, it was written under Hillary Wall's name. There
was no pseudonym. When it was first published in hardcover.
It was on I've got it here, it was on
oh gosh, what do they call it? Victor Golans Publishing.
You've you've made Nick, you've probably seen these before. The
they're the hideous yallow books with the red font and

(16:07):
a lot of a lot of crime fiction authors were
published by this. It's a British publisher, hideous and all
the covers look like this, and there's hundreds of them.
No image, no painting, no photographs, just this. It almost
looks like a like an added at cracker barrel or something.

Speaker 1 (16:24):
Right, it's so bad, like get your Old West picture
taken here?

Speaker 2 (16:31):
Yes, exactly. But what's interesting about it, though, is it
it came out just like this. This was the first,
the first publication, and it was British And it says
on the front of it though, it says following his
police investigations, the con Game and the Young Prey and
his action thrillers Girl on the Run and Run when
I say go here, is a ghost story by Hillary

(16:54):
Wall and then below that it says or is it
so little different? But it came out. It came out
in the US with what I consider an equally bad cover,
maybe just not as bad, but more of a mystery
type of cover. This was a hardcover through Double Day

(17:14):
in nineteen seventy one. It's at a little bit better.
And then it came out on Arrow as this with
the girl in the candle, which I like fairly well.
And then the version that you have, which is the
Dell Shadow Guests, which you can see over here. But Dell,

(17:35):
from what I can tell Nick, it looks like he
may have just been writing a mystery novel. But when
Dell got ahold of it, they're like, Okay, wait a minute,
we're definitely marketing this as a gothic or we're going
to slap a woman on the cover and market it
that way. And I really do I like the cover
because I love the way that they had the staircase
post here and then they have her coming down the

(17:57):
stairs with their hair kind of blowing in the back.

Speaker 1 (18:01):
I guess see how the door's open so the wind's
blow inside.

Speaker 2 (18:04):
Yeah, it's it's a really cool cover. I like it
a lot, but but again, I don't know if it
really started out as a Gothic I don't think it
was really meant to be that way, but it it's
like so many other books. It it just happened that way,
and it happened to a lot of early mystery writers,
you know, would write, you know, some type of mystery
or crime fiction in the nineteen twenties or thirties, and

(18:26):
then years later Dell and other publishers found out about
it and said, hey, we could definitely take this mystery
and make it a gothic and we'll slap up gothic
cover on it and get a new life out of it.

Speaker 1 (18:36):
Yeah. I thought it kind of had some some some
gothic gothic tropes in it.

Speaker 2 (18:43):
Yeah, it's uh, it could definitely, it could definitely fall
into the gothic genre. There's a couple of things that
make it a little bit different, which we'll talk about.
And it almost kind of borders on a soft horror
novel as well, like something they like, like I don't know,
like John Saw would have written in the nineties, minus
the huge supernatural effect part of it. But it's pretty

(19:06):
soft horror in a way, or or you know what,
it could be one of those lifetime made for TV
movies with a little spooky atmosphere that's got Kelly from
Saved by the Bell in it, because she's in all
of those.

Speaker 1 (19:18):
Yeah. Well yeah, it's called yeah, suspense, that's what it's
called suspense. I think it's very classic, like a classic,
like the old radio show. The Radio Show is suspense.
That kind of what reminds me of.

Speaker 2 (19:35):
Yeah, most definitely. Yeah. So when you were because you
probably weren't familiar with the other covers, you went into
it as this is a full blown gothic right Oh yeah, okay,
very cool, Yeah all right, yeah yeah. Right through the
opening of the book, I really liked the opening line
of it where it says, and it's all written in

(19:56):
first person perspective, and it's all from this guy named Howard,
and he says in the in the very first line,
he says, though I'm well inland now when the wind
blows stiffly over the moors and the low, dark puffs
of cumulus roll across the sky, or when the rain
beats its heavy, steady siege, and the dampness crawls into
my clothes, with me. I swear I smell the sea

(20:17):
and hear the goals. Again, those are my morbid moments,
and I can't get Heather Cottage out of my mind.
It's like, it's amazing, Yeah it is.

Speaker 1 (20:29):
Yeah, And that's I mean right there, that's that's super Gothic.
That's a super go intro. They always overload, overload the
story with that kind of a description of what's the word.

Speaker 2 (20:43):
Yeah, it's got a sort of a dark aura about it.
It's definitely atmospheric. Yep. And it's the same thing Lovecraft
made a career out of, you know, describing the black
mountains of you know, whatever horrible place he's you know,
describing it's It's how he made his career, just like that.

(21:04):
But but Hillary Wall's writing that just gives you an example.
His writing is like that, that style, like in the
police Procedural novels, when when the police officers coming over
to the dead body, he's he's describing it like that.
He's he's a great he's just a great writer.

Speaker 1 (21:19):
Yeah. I thought this is way more literary than most
Gothics that I've read.

Speaker 2 (21:25):
Yes, Yeah, if you get into like W. W. D. Ross,
William Ross, he writes very generic Gothics, and it's the
scenes are just this happens, and then this happens, and
then this happens, and then this happens. Where as we
can see from Walls writing, it's this happens, and then
something kind of gets thrown in there. So then this

(21:46):
has to happen because of this crazy thing that just happened,
and then it kind of spires his spirals down. You
can't really predict what's going to happen in the next scene.
It doesn't it doesn't follow a path.

Speaker 1 (21:56):
No, yeah, I was, well, you want to talk about
what the basic premise I guess here is.

Speaker 2 (22:04):
Yeah, so what I liked about the very beginning of
the book. Also, I just want to mention this is
this is a cool little concept. It goes into the
concept of foreshadowing these horrific events that are going to
happen to the protagonist and the future. So in this
opening page, the main character, he's basically like saying, if
someone had just warned me, I would have never moved

(22:27):
to that seaside cottage in England. We never would have
moved there if I had known. And that's a cool
little thing because it's considered the I don't know what
it's really called, but it's called had I but known
school of mystery writing, and it actually got started in
nineteen oh eight by an author named Mary Roberts Reinhart.

(22:51):
She created that with her book The Circular Staircase, where
the beginning of the book, the author's like, if I
had just known about this, I would have never done
this makes the reader think, oh my god, something hopeful happen,
Like this character is like just warning us and themselves
that if they had only known, then this horrible thing
would have never taken place. And that's that's really I

(23:13):
love that. I love that about the way that this
book starts out at But uh, the premise is this
guy named Howard. He's he's writing it from first person perspective.
Like I mentioned, he's an architect. The dude is loaded,
Like this dude is so wealthy. He's he falls in
love with this actress named Angela in New York City.

(23:36):
He takes her out on the date and they eventually
strike up a relationship, and he asked her to marry
him using a bracelet, which is really weird, like your
only give somebody a ring, but he gives her a bracelet,
which he calls a slave bracelet, the slave bracelet.

Speaker 1 (23:53):
I thought she didn't she call it the slave slave?

Speaker 2 (23:56):
Yeah she did, And she said, you want to give
me a slave bracelet? And he ends up giving her one.
So they spend a few pages explaining their relationship and
how they met, and then they talk a little bit
about Angela's just her family's backstory. Nothing too extravagant at
the beginning. But what happens is she ends up she

(24:19):
ends up getting depressed, I guess is what you would
call it. She starts having panic attacks and and Nick,
she's a hypochondriac. When you when you think she's a hypochondriac.

Speaker 1 (24:30):
Yeah, yeah. She constantly thinks that she has a cancer, right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:36):
She thinks that she has cancer. Like if she gets
a headache, she thinks that it's a brain tumor. If
she bumps into something, she thinks that it's going to
create breast cancer. Like it's the crazy stuff. And she
just starts getting more depressed and more depressed. And you know,
Howard is this booming architect. He's making a ton of money.
He's really you know, he's really successful, and his wife

(24:58):
is going through this horrible depression. She's starting to withdraw.
She doesn't really want to be intimate with him anymore.
So he was like throwing up his hands, like I
don't really know what to do. So he ends up
taking her to the doctor. They say, hey, she's got
this nervous breakdown. She's gonna need psychiatric treatment. And then
she starts going into uh, going into in the treatment
to try to get better, which she does. But then

(25:22):
something horrible happens to Howard. And you want to tell
us what happened to Howard?

Speaker 1 (25:28):
So, yeah, so he has a Howard has a heart attack. Yeah,
but he that happens in London, though.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
Yeah. Yeah, they moved to London because he was going
to work on a project there as the architect guy.
They're in London, she's starting to get better, but then,
like you said, he has his heart attack.

Speaker 1 (25:47):
Yeah so she so, yeah, they're in New York City.
Then his job takes him to London, and then she
is miserable. She was happy in New York City. Issue, Yeah,
and so she really hates London. She is her backstories
that she is English. Yeah, so that the Yeah, at

(26:08):
the beginning, they lay down her her backstory of she
was kind of the dad abandoned them, the mom came
to the US to live, right, and then the mom
and then the mom dies. So she's kind of like
an orphan, yes, and doesn't know her background.

Speaker 2 (26:28):
And it And it's so funny because in London he
says that he he had a chauffeured Rolls Royce for
her so she could just shop all day at her convenience.
Like he's got her spoiled so much, and she still
isn't happy.

Speaker 1 (26:47):
No, In fact, the only thing that makes her happy
is when she has something real to do. So he
has the heart attack and now she gets to take
care of him, so she starts feeling better.

Speaker 2 (26:57):
Yeah. Yeah, she starts taking care of him, and she
I think she decorates the apartment or something when they
got married, and because like stuff like she can fixate on.

Speaker 1 (27:06):
Right she Yeah, she doesn't want to be completely taken
care of. Right, She's she's not happy just rolling around
on the Rolls Royce buying meat cokes.

Speaker 2 (27:16):
Right, Yeah, it's surprisingly that doesn't make her happy. Yeah,
I can only imagine how that conversation would go if
I told my wife Sarah, hey, I'm gonna I'm gonna
have this Rolls Royce for you at you're convenience up
town shopping all day.

Speaker 1 (27:32):
Yeah, but we also we also forgot to point out
that he is much older than she is.

Speaker 2 (27:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (27:39):
Yeah, she's like nineteen when they get married and he's
thirty five.

Speaker 2 (27:45):
Yeah exactly. Yeah that's a good point. Yeah he's Yeah,
he's much older than her. But yeah, they have he
has the heart attack, she's got to take care of him.
So then she she decides that she wants to move
them out of London. The doctor tells Howard that he
really needs to rest recuperate, not be working, like he's

(28:08):
gonna need months and months of rest. And so she
ends up just driving west and finds this little town called,
oh gosh, when is it Windhurst? Yeah, Wildhurst, which is
on the English Channel. And Nick, she she just like
she just tells him that she's just driving one day

(28:32):
and she just ends up finding this house.

Speaker 1 (28:34):
M y, Yes, off off very far off the beaten path. Yes,
Like it's not something you would just stumble stumble upon.

Speaker 2 (28:43):
Right, And I found that to be a little bit odd,
Like I was like, a, I don't get it. But
but she finds the house and unlike a normal Gothic novel.
This isn't a Victorian mansion. It's not a large estate.
It's actually just a normal two level house, which is
what they call a cottage. But it's just a normal

(29:04):
two level house. They make a point to see, well,
it makes a point in here to say it's not
a mansion. It's just a normal just a normal house.

Speaker 1 (29:11):
It does a lot of land though, yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:14):
It does have a lot of land, and it's got
like it's nestled into trees. But the house is sitting
right against the the edge of the cliff, like it's
right on the cliff's edge. It's got a beautiful view
of the ocean. It's got like some stairs on the
side that go down the down the cliff to the beach,
which is where some of the action takes place in
the book, is around the stairs that lead down to

(29:34):
the to the beach area. But she ends up talking
to a guy named Grubbins, Mister Grubbins Ethelbert Grubbins, he's
the local realtor. And she asked him, you know about
the house, and it's called Heather Cottage, and that it uh,
it's I think told here maybe a little bit later
that it belonged to the Kremlins, uh Krimlin, not not

(29:57):
Russian Krimlin, but like c R I M. A. L
I and the Kremlins, and that the house has been
abandoned for a few years, that they had left. They
left the house. So that's kind of where where she
gets the idea that, hey, we probably this seems like
a good place to live. I want to live here.

(30:18):
It goes back and tells Howard and he's not, like,
he's not that was it.

Speaker 1 (30:22):
No, it's not even for rent. She guy into it.

Speaker 2 (30:27):
Yeah, yeah, it's the city there. It's just abandoned house.
But there's there's not there's a rental sign or anything
about it. I mean, it's just it's just sitting there.

Speaker 1 (30:36):
So it was specifically chosen.

Speaker 2 (30:40):
Yes, yes, specifically chosen.

Speaker 1 (30:44):
It seems odd, yes.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
Yeah, uh yeah. And we kind of found out later
at the end of the book some of the stuff
is we kind of piece it all together.

Speaker 1 (30:54):
Yeah. I would like to point out that none of
this is pointless, Like all every single bit of little backstory,
all of it is on point and matters. It's very
it was great.

Speaker 2 (31:08):
Yeah, almost every detail in the book actually matters. Yeah,
you're right. Yeah, it's one of those books where you
kind of have to pay attention. You can't just breeze
through it. You gotta you gotta remember certain things.

Speaker 1 (31:22):
Yeah, it'll m night shyamala on you. You'll be looking back like, oh,
look at that. If I just had noticed that, I
would have figured it out.

Speaker 2 (31:31):
Yeah. Yeah. But Angela's doctor is named to Armstrong and
he practices out of London, so he's her psychiatrist. He's
practicing out of London, but he informs Angela that he
has a flat that he lives in that's about an
hour's drive from this little town of Wildhurst, which is

(31:51):
convenient for her because she can still go see him
by train. He's only an hour away. She doesn't have
to go all the way back to London to see him.
And Howard gets a doctor, a cardiologist I guess in
the nearby area, named doctor Princess, so they both have
access to their doctors even in this secluded, wild you know,
out of the way place. Just again, there's a point

(32:12):
to it.

Speaker 1 (32:14):
And then they're right. There is the Gothic trope when
you take the person from one area and you drop
them into this new location. That's isolated. Yeah, that's very
gothic right there.

Speaker 2 (32:25):
Yeah, it is. And it typically always is a situation
where it's a female that learns of an inheritance that
she didn't even know about. Someone has died her family,
and you know, someone knocks on the door and says, hey,
your your great uncle has died and you're the only
person that we could possibly leave these millions of dollars to,

(32:46):
and so I want you to stop teaching school with
this little tiny place in the middle of nowhere, and
you're going to go to live in this gigantic mansion.
And and that's how it normally happens. And it's typically
it's a teacher, or it could be a maid or
or or someone like tutoring a child or something like that.
Nurse nurse, Yeah, that's the other one.

Speaker 1 (33:08):
Yeah, that was That's one thing that I really liked
about this was it It wasn't just the single person
going out there and being like, what is all this
craziness going on? Like is this real? I like that
there was the two of them and they're both experiencing these, uh,
spooky things that are happening. They're both seeing the spooky
things together.

Speaker 2 (33:28):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, they both they both see it, and
and that makes it a little bit, in my opinion,
makes a little bit different than the Gothic because most
of the time with the Gothics, it's the girl that
is seeing and hearing things, but no one else does, right, Like,
you're just you're just crazy.

Speaker 1 (33:44):
Yeah, So so when you're reading this, you know that
this is really happening, like when you see someone standing
on the lawn. Someone's for real standing on the lawn,
they said, they both see the guy, you know.

Speaker 2 (33:54):
Yeah, exactly, but h So the two decide to move
into the house and they get all their stuff to
bring it over with their with their helpers, and then
the helpers were turned back to London, but they ended
up picking up this girl to help them as a
sort of the care taker of the house, a housekeeper.
Her name is Beverly, and she explains to both of

(34:17):
them that at the bottom of the cliff, like this
is a really winding road that goes up to the
top of the cliff where their houses, but at the
in the turn, it's like a really wicked turn. Years ago,
a nineteen year old woman named Nancy Kremlin had died
there in a car wreck with a soldier that was
driving the car and he was assumed dead. His body

(34:40):
was never found for her. Uh, the only thing that
was found was just teeth. That's how they could match
up the records that it was her. The car burned
to the burned to a crisp at the bottom of
the cliff, and that and that Heather Cottage was owned
by Nancy's parents. She was an only child, and then
that's why they after the death the Nancy, they moved

(35:01):
away and just left the house abandon But something weird
happens when Beverly steps into Heather Cottage for the first time.
Do you remember that.

Speaker 1 (35:12):
She has a psychic feeling. She gets a chill and
she gets spooked, so she, uh, she runs back out
of the house real fast.

Speaker 2 (35:22):
Yeah, And I was like, what is what's going on here?

Speaker 1 (35:25):
Yea?

Speaker 2 (35:26):
And yeah, she runs out crying and then you know
Howard ask her what's going on and she says that
she felt as if an evil man was walking on
her grave. Yeah, she says it was a cold and
evil feeling. And then after a few minutes, she just
she goes back in the house like this, She goes
back in not a big deal. Yeah, I'm not going

(35:48):
I'm not going back in if I feel like that.
You know, it's crazy.

Speaker 1 (35:52):
Yeah, that part was, and you know, before we go
on there, there might be spoilers, and there will definitely
be spoilers towards the end. Yeah, so if you you
want to read this, you know, beware. But I thought
that she was kind of like a red Herring.

Speaker 2 (36:10):
Very much so, yeah, very much so. I was very
suspicious of her. I didn't know what was going on
with her. And there's throughout the book there's multiple people
saying that she has psychic abilities, like she can sense
when death is going to.

Speaker 1 (36:28):
Occur, right, Yeah, that she prophesied the crash on the
mountain side. Yeah someone didn't someone get hit by a
car or something some.

Speaker 2 (36:39):
Yeah there was. Yeah, it was some mother pushing their
stroller or with a kid across the street and gets they
get plowed by a car. Apparently she knew about it,
like ahead of time.

Speaker 1 (36:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:51):
Yeah, yeah, they said that she was like two weeks ago,
she was standing in that sharp curve and said that
the horrible death was going to happen, and it did, right.

Speaker 1 (37:05):
Figure when you mentioned that the original girl that went
off the cliff, when you're like, oh, they just identified
her with her teeth. They keep repeating this gruesome detail
and it's like part of her jaw and all this
left of this woman is part of her jaw. So
you like visualize this disgusting, gory, gruesome jaw with like.

Speaker 2 (37:28):
Three teeth, right, and and you know, going back to
Walls writing in the Fred Fellow series, he will describe
the most grisly details of a body, like I think
there's one one book they end up finding a the
torso of a body inside of a furnace at a house.
It's abandoned house, and they're trying to like they don't

(37:49):
have a face or teeth, and they don't have any
arms or feet, and they're like, yeah, he's describing this
in gross detail, and like, how do you identify torso?
Like there's nothing to identify and then this is crazy
how they he writes that stuff.

Speaker 1 (38:07):
Yeah, it's it's funny and made it feel like it
was more real by how gross it was, like the
medical examiner is explaining it to us all.

Speaker 2 (38:15):
Of a sudden, yes. Yeah. And one of the things
about about Hillary Wall was he would ride with homicide
detectives to try to learn more about the insides of
the industry, so he was kind of had like an
insider view of it. He was always doing that. That's interesting, Yeah,
but it's it's This house is is almost kind of

(38:36):
like abandoned on top of the on top of the hill,
because in terms of neighbors, there's really only two. I think.
There's this guy named Arthur who lives in a house
up the road. Howard and Angela they had got well,
they eventually meet Arthur, but he's he's kind of a
wacky guy. He writes children's books. His mother's dad and

(39:00):
he lives with his well, he doesn't live with her,
but he has a housekeeper named Missus Drummond that comes
over and takes care of him. But he's a really
quirky guy. He writes these children's novels. He talks about
his dead mom all the time. So he's one of
their neighbors. The other neighbor is this artist that's kind
of reclusive that doesn't really talk to anybody. But those

(39:21):
are the only only real neighbors that they have, and
a few days after they move in, this is kind
of like a This was really a key scene to
the book is when they a few days after they
move in, Angela introduces Howard to this old woman on
a bicycle and Angela explains to Howard that this old

(39:42):
woman had directed her to the real estate agent Grubbins
the first day that she had visited Wildhurst and to
inquire about the Heather Cottage. And the old woman says
to Howard that she lives in the house up the road,
and she informs Howard that Heather Cottage is haunted by
a ghost, and she says that's why the Kremlin's actually

(40:03):
abandoned the house. And she also says that Nancy's death
and that wreck was due to the ghost and that
it wasn't an accident, and she says there's going to
be more murders. And she says and she describes the
ghost as an angry man. And I was thinking, this
is bizarre, Like what a bizarre conversation to have.

Speaker 1 (40:26):
All I could picture was, I know, you're gonna bust
my balls on this. But Scooby Doo.

Speaker 3 (40:32):
Yes, because she's got the wispy white hair, and I
just imagined her in like some some gray baggy ripped
up coat.

Speaker 1 (40:43):
Yeah I got one tooth, and she's like be careful,
it's haunted.

Speaker 2 (40:47):
Don't go in that mine, you kids, be careful. That's
that's exactly what it really came across as like this
this old lady and she's spoken a cigarette and the
way she talked is this like esus Lucy Goosey. But
it's that scene is important later down the road, which
we'll talk about. But so your thoughts on them moving in.

(41:12):
They have basically two neighbors. They say the house is haunted.
I was thinking, okay, there's no help anywhere. Their doctors
are a few miles away, Like, bad stuff is going
to happen. Obviously Beverley just ran away away from something
cold and evil. So I was thinking, you know, this
is going to be a bad thing. What do you think?

Speaker 1 (41:30):
Oh? Yeah, I was. I thought that it was going
to be a real, a real ghost story. I thought
that this is it, this is it's happening, like because
you know in the Gothics they always lead you to it. Yeah, yeah,
steer you away. And I was like, oh, I think
it's going to happen this time. I was all in.

Speaker 2 (41:47):
I was too, so Howard so so. Howard and Angela
are outside having breakfast one morning and Arthur comes up
and he introduces himself, and they tell him that they
already met his housekeeper, Missus Drummond. Either they saw her
on the bike or whatever, and she's an old lady

(42:09):
and they just kind of describe her and I don't
know if they said bicycle, but they said that they
had already met her. And so Arthur's like, okay, cool,
you met Missus Drummond or whatever, and he confirms that
her name's Missus Drummond. He tells me he writes children's
stories and he talks about his dead mother. And he's
kind of like a pesky neighbor at this point because
he just keeps coming over and at what point he

(42:29):
gets drunk and ends up falling asleep on their couch.
He saw their food, and he's not an interesting neighbor
at all. It's like somebody you don't really want to
have come over, but he just keeps showing up. But so,
and that kind of stuff is kind of leading up
to the very the first night of the craziness. Did

(42:50):
you want to go into what happens the first night
or you want me to go into that.

Speaker 1 (42:55):
Well, let's see. So the first night there laying laying
in bed and he's he's still awake. Yeah, and they
sleep in different beds. They got the two different beds.
Kind of important, I.

Speaker 2 (43:13):
Don't know, a great Brady bunch.

Speaker 1 (43:17):
So he so he hears this, this laughing coming from downstairs. Yeah,
so here's this spooky more Scooby doos. All of this
is very very Scooby. So this creepy laughing in the house,
and it gets louder and louder, and he eventually goes

(43:40):
down to investigate, and uh, the laughing stops. So it's
not it's not around when he's when he's around.

Speaker 2 (43:50):
Yeah, and it's always downstairs.

Speaker 1 (43:56):
Trying to do Does he see the person outside the
first time?

Speaker 2 (44:02):
No, he just hears the laughter, okay, And and they
describe it as kind of like it's like a sadistic
laughter kind of like yeah, it's like a like an
evil chuckle kind of thing. But when he goes down there,
there's nobody, Like, you're just like, okay, wait a minute,
this thing is like an apparition or something, because there's

(44:22):
nothing there.

Speaker 1 (44:25):
Yeah, so he goes that's right. So he goes back
upstairs and and his wife is awake and and she's
like did you did you hear that? Yeah, he's like, yeah,
I just went downstairs to check it out. There was
somebody laughing. And you know, at first, this guy is
a very rational person. All of these ghost stories. He's
just like, no, oh, psychic girl, I don't think so

(44:47):
like there's yeah, there's no ghosts. There's no I you know,
I don't even think that he even believe in psychology.
When she was first having the breakdown, right, like, he's
he's a very uh, staunch serious man.

Speaker 2 (45:01):
Yeah. Yeah, for the first I guess maybe the first
start of the book, he's fairly unconvinced on any of
the stuff.

Speaker 1 (45:08):
Right, So he hears this and he's like, what does
he say? Like it's the wind or the pipes or
something like that.

Speaker 2 (45:15):
Yeah, people laugh on the house. Yeah, it's all part
of the house.

Speaker 1 (45:20):
Yeah, maybe it's coming from outside, he said, Maybe it's
a noise from outside that sounds like laughter when it
gets to the house.

Speaker 2 (45:26):
Yeah, exactly. The second night, the same thing happened. He
goes down there, there's no one there. But but if
you recall what he's down there looking around, Angela is
screaming upstairs. So he runs upstairs to find out what's
going on with her. She's screaming. The windows open and
there's rain pouring in, and this is kind of what

(45:47):
you were talking about earlier. When the lightning flash occurs,
that's when Howard he's a shadowy figure standing on the
lawn and he only sees it for a split second.
He's like, wait a minute, was that a man or
maybe it was just my imagination? Is there really somebody
standing on the lawn, And it's kind of leaves the
reader thinking, well, maybe there really is a guy. I

(46:07):
don't know.

Speaker 1 (46:08):
Yeah, that's when I was like, oh, this is yeah,
this is getting good. This is gonna be There's either
there either really is a ghost or it's you know,
it's somebody that's that's there and it's it's messing with them,
some real adversaries, real person.

Speaker 2 (46:24):
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I was I was
thinking that it was like a stalker situation and that's
what we were going to get out of it.

Speaker 1 (46:31):
But I mean, the ghosts could have went outside, the
ghost could have been the one standing in the field.

Speaker 2 (46:36):
You know, Yeah, you never know. You never know how ghosts,
how ghosts react.

Speaker 1 (46:41):
He disappears in the lightning and he's I don't remember
if it's mentioned the first time that he is wearing
a the uniform, the military uniform.

Speaker 2 (46:51):
Yeah, yeah, he's got what looks like an army coat on,
and later on in the book he's described as being
covered in blood and dirt. Pretty descriptive. But it's really,
you know, up to this plat, it's kind of frightening stuff.
I mean, they've got all the doors locked in, don't
know how anybody would be getting in and laughing downstairs,

(47:14):
and this idea of this strange man on their lungs,
and you gotta remember their they're up on the top
of a cliff, and they really don't have many neighbors,
so it's kind of a weird thing. But Howard he
he talks to Beverly the next night. He asked if
if Heather Cottage is haunted, and she says no, it's

(47:38):
definitely not. But she also says that she doesn't remember
the first time that she came into the house with
Howard and Angela. She doesn't recall the time that she
ran out crying saying this there was an evil guy
walking on her grave. She doesn't recall that. So Howard's
talking to her and like saying, hey, how could you
not remember this? Like do you remember running out of

(47:58):
the house just a few days ago I first got here?
And she goes, oh, yeah, I do remember that now.
She said I had a feeling. She said it was
like feeling the wind coming out of a mausoleum. That's
how she described her feeling. I was like, oh, that's
an interesting inscription. That's pretty cool. But Beverly's like, hey,

(48:20):
she's she's not convinced that it's haunt it. So I'm like, okay, well,
wait a minute. This goes back to the stalker thing.
Then she's probably psychic and she doesn't see anything or
feel anything, so it's got to be stalker situation. That's
what I was thinking.

Speaker 1 (48:33):
Yeah, what I think what's weird is he's like he's
kind of like this is dangerous, and she's just like no, no, no,
I love it here. You know what's Yeah, it's no
big deal. We'll just stay Yeah. When she's the one
at the windows seeing the guy screaming yeah, And they

(48:55):
talked to some more of the neighbors, more of the
people in, and some people are like, you gonna hear
more and more ghost stories. The local doctor. The local
doctor tells him the pilical doctor's way into the ghost stories.

Speaker 2 (49:11):
Yes, yeah, right, yeah, and yeah. Depending on who they
talk to, they always go back to Beverly and how
she senses ghosts and death ahead of time, and that
the house is haunted. But he he starts to question
at this point, he's kind of like on a balance beam,
like he's like, well, part of me says no, this,

(49:31):
none of this is possible. But then the other half
starts to say, well, maybe this isn't just my imagination.
But I also find it interesting when he's talking to
these people that are keeping mind their British they always
kind of like they're condescending. They say, well, we never
thought Americans were buying into that ghost stuff. Yeah, Like
it's a knock on America.

Speaker 1 (49:53):
Right, or is it a knock on the British.

Speaker 2 (49:55):
I don't know. I'm not really sure. But he says
something like, well, you British always have all the ghost
stories about every castle and every manor and all this stuff.
There's ghosts everywhere in England, Like, well, you Americans don't
believe in that stuff. Like he's like, yeah, well I don't,
but I'm just asking just to be asking, and he
asked everybody about the ghost, like he literally is going

(50:17):
around asking everybody about ghosts.

Speaker 1 (50:19):
He goes back to the banker, who hates him. He
asked the banker and he's in the banker She's like,
what hell, I don't get out of my office right
asking about ghost nonsense.

Speaker 2 (50:32):
And he goes and uh, well, the next the next night, uh,
Angela wake wakes up and this was the army coat
part where she she wakes up. She tells how Or
that she had a bad dream. She says that she
may have been awake though, and she can't remember if
she's sleepwalking or if she had a dream. But he
finds her and she went to the window. She tells

(50:54):
him that she saw a man standing there in an
army coat, but she couldn't see his face, but she
says she could fel his eyes on her, and she
says that the eyes suggested that she should come outside.
And so that's I know that Angela heard the laughter before,
but this is the first time that Angela has saw
the man, I think. And now Howard's like, okay, wait

(51:16):
a minute, now you're seeing the man. You're here on
the laughter and you're seeing the man too, like, that's
two of us, So I think it's reality had set
in at this point.

Speaker 1 (51:26):
Yeah, and right, and like you said, he still is.
He goes back and forth, He's like, is this He
starts to believe that it's that it's ghosts, and then
he's like, no, this is ridiculous. This is somebody really
messing with us. And because also when they talk to
the locals, they're like, oh, it's probably because you're an American, right, right,

(51:46):
someone's messing with you because you're from the state.

Speaker 2 (51:49):
You're a Yank. Yeah, you're a yank, so they're messing
with you. But but the next night is really when
things kind of get crazy, because the next night, Howard
wakes up hearing what he describes as a power saw
ripping through wood, but more annoying than that. And then
Angela hears the sounds too, and together the two of

(52:12):
them hear what I assume is just the sounds of
what it would have been if when Nancy and her
soldier boyfriend crashed in the turn. So they hear the
car slam into the guard rail, they hear the squeal
of breaks, they hear the crash and the explosion, and
then they're freaking out. They're looking at her like, oh

(52:33):
my god, somebody just died on the road up here.
So they run outside, get in their car, drive down
the road, nothing like, there's no accident, there's no break
marks on the road, nothing has happened. And then when
they get back to the house, they discover the light
is on in the attic and that part right there,

(52:53):
I was, oh, man, that is so twisted, like that
would be the worst thing come home, because attic is
so far out of the way. You know, you don't
go to your attic like a couple times a year,
and you know that somebody was up there with a
light on. And of course he goes up there and
he doesn't find anything. There's nobody there, and there's there's
no accident, and there's nobody in the attic.

Speaker 1 (53:13):
No, there's all the dust is still there, like you
can't figure out. There's not even any footprints to get
to the light.

Speaker 2 (53:19):
Yeah. Nothing.

Speaker 1 (53:21):
Yeah, they say, they're like, uh when they see it,
they go, oh, maybe the whoever dropped the chauffeur when
they brought their bags in, Maybe they turned it on
and we just didn't notice for four days or whatever.

Speaker 2 (53:35):
Right, and this part right here, when that attic light
came on. Nick, did you ever see Paranormal Activity the
first one? No, So in Paranormal Activity, the whole the
whole movie is shot like a found film footage kind
of thing, found footage whatever. I'm trying to say, but
it's kind of shot like that. But it's all from
there the couple's bedroom, and you can see the doorway

(53:58):
and you can see the hallway. But every night the
couple wakes up and they can hear things banging around
downstairs in their little townhouse. So down the stairs you
can hear things banging around, and they'll go down and investigating.
There's nothing there, and it happens the next night and
the next night, and then his wife keeps getting up
out of bed and she just kind of walks around

(54:18):
like she's sleepwalking. But what was interesting about it is
in that movie that when they're asleep and everything's dark,
you can just look down the hallway and a light
comes on, like in their attic, which kind of reminded
me of this. When I was reading this book, I
was like, Ah, that's very similar to paranormal Activity. I
was like, maybe that whoever made paranormal activity. Read this book,

(54:41):
it's almost like shot for shot. But yeah, that that
creeps me out. It's just the idea that that attic
light was on, like that was that did it for me.

Speaker 1 (54:50):
Yeah, it's creepy for sure. And you're right, why is
the why is the light coming on in the attic
scarier than the spooky laughter downstairs?

Speaker 2 (54:58):
Yeah, I don't know, it just does something. It's like,
you know, when I was a kid, we had we
had an attic and had one of those pulled down
ropes and he pulled the stairs down and you just
you never went up there, like it was just kind
of forbidden as a kid. You don't climb the stairs
to go up there. And as a kid, you're like,
there's scary stuff up there.

Speaker 1 (55:18):
Oh yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:19):
And our in our house, we had three unfinished rooms
up there and the light we had an like we
bought like an abandoned house. Like there were literally bats
in the house. My dad, I remember my dad shooting
bats inside the house was too rifle. It was crazy,
like my dad is shooting things in our living room.

(55:40):
So it was nuts. But so that whole top of
our house was completely trash. It was just abandoned water
came in like it was just insane. But he just
never went up there. But see a light on up
there would have been freaky to me, like that would
have that would have set me off.

Speaker 1 (55:56):
So this is probably some repressed memory of yours.

Speaker 2 (56:02):
Yeah, that's it could be. But it gets to Howard
so bad that he marches this way up to the
other neighbor, which we haven't met yet named. Oh gosh,
what's the guy's name. I don't even know if I
wrote it. I just have this painter, yeah, the artist guy.
And he goes over and talks to him, and this

(56:23):
guy's like complete dick. He's a compleet dick. Like he
comes to the door, like what do you want? And
Howard is like, I want to know about this house.
I want to know if there's a ghost there, Like
what's haunting me and my wife and the author? This
artist is go away. I have no idea what you're
talking about. I know nothing about the house. I've never

(56:44):
stepped foot in the house. Why are you asking me?
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (56:48):
Go back there. He's one of the non ghost people.
He's like, what, like, no, I didn't hear any crash
last night no, yeah, like nothing has happened. Yeah, I
was here when they initially went off. Yeah, but there's
no ghosts. He's like, I've seen your light come on
in the middle of the night, so I just figured
you were up late at night.

Speaker 2 (57:08):
Yeah. Yeah. This guy was like he basically just shut
him down, go away, and we never see the artist again,
like he's out in the book.

Speaker 1 (57:17):
Yeah, he's my favorite character. What are you doing on
my lawn? What do you want?

Speaker 2 (57:23):
And here we have the but yeah, it was crazy, so.

Speaker 1 (57:30):
We have the This is how it goes throughout the stories,
that goes back and forth, where someone talks them into
it being not real, it's not ghosts, and then someone
comes back and is like, here's this crazy ghost story
and he relates it to what's going on and he's like, oh,
maybe it's real. And then he meets somebody else. He
meets the cop or whatever, and the cops like this
is ridiculous.

Speaker 2 (57:51):
Someone you Yeah, he ends up contacting the constable, and
the constable comes in and yeah, just says, everything's got
a logical explanation. I don't know why you're thinking that
this is some ghostly thing. There's there's a logical explanation
to all of this, and then he just says, there's
probably somebody playing pranks on you, and I'll just put

(58:12):
out a patrol and just see what's going on.

Speaker 1 (58:15):
But but even even debunks the psychic girl he does.
He's like, she's psychic.

Speaker 2 (58:23):
No, yeah, yeah, he says that. And then the doctor
later on the book says kind of the same same thing,
because he says that he did a bunch of tests
on her and she she was just normal, So he
doesn't know what her actual psychic strength is. He just
he's like, I don't know. But but the night after
Howard talks to the artist, uh, he starts to leave

(58:47):
lights on downstairs so you can try to see what's
going on down there. So he leaves all the lights on,
and then he wakes up more laughing. He finds Angela
at the window. She's staring outside. She asked Howard if
the man's out there, and Howard asked Angela what woke
her up? What did she see? What does she think

(59:07):
she saw outside? And then they end up going back
to bed, and then the next four nights everything's good,
like there's no problems, there's no issues. It looks like
they're getting back to like a normal routine, and then
the laughter starts up again one night and then there's
just he runs downstairs, there's nobody there, and you know,
then you're like, okay, something, it's just something's not right.

Speaker 1 (59:28):
Well, she goes outside in the middle of night. She
starts sleepwalking.

Speaker 2 (59:32):
Yeah, yeah, she's sleepwalking and going over to the to
the to the window, back to the bed. But then
she's going outside more and more, which kind of like
goes back to what she was saying. The man with
his eyes just encouraging her to go outside.

Speaker 1 (59:47):
M and she's yeah, she's not scared of him. No,
she thinks that he's something that's good or something like that.

Speaker 2 (59:54):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. She later says that, yeah, he seems
good now, there's nothing wrong with it. Even though he's
covered in blood and dirt, he's perfectly good. Like he's
a good guy. He's a good guy. Yeah, So doctor
go ahead.

Speaker 1 (01:00:11):
I would say there's one important aspect that we are
kind of not talking about, and it's how much he
loves his wife very much. So he is like understanding
about all of her issues. He tries to like help
and she doesn't want to leave, and he's like, you know,
we really need to get out of here. But to

(01:00:32):
make her happy, he's like, Okay, well we'll stay a
little bit longer. I mean, he's like hopelessly devoted to
this one.

Speaker 2 (01:00:42):
He is. And yeah, like you said, he wants to
go back to back to London at least, or back
to New York, and she's she just wants to stay there.
And if it were me and all this stuff was
happening and she had just gotten through all this depression
and panic attacks of him, like hey, you don't have
a choice.

Speaker 1 (01:01:00):
Going.

Speaker 2 (01:01:04):
But he's like yeah, he's so patient with her. And
he's again it might go back to what you were saying.
He's older than she is, and you know she's young
and youthful and and all that stuff, and he's just
in love and she's I don't know, she's just she's irritating.
She's so irritating.

Speaker 1 (01:01:26):
But I just want everyone to know that while he
Eric was reading this, he texted me and he's like,
why is why is he even with her? Like we're
watching a soap opera together or something like why is
he with her?

Speaker 2 (01:01:40):
Like I don't understand. Why does he just drop this
fool he is like head o her, heels for her,
and he'll do anything, like like you said, he'll do
anything for her, anything, it doesn't matter. And oh and
keep in mind, this whole time they're not they're not
intimate this whole time.

Speaker 1 (01:01:57):
Yeah, he's dying. He's like, yeah, he's understanding. He's the
most understanding guy ever.

Speaker 2 (01:02:03):
Yeah. She keeps putting him off, like maybe one day,
maybe one day, you could touch me and get in
my bed, but not right now. That's tough.

Speaker 1 (01:02:15):
Yeah. So this guy's frustrated. He's sexually frustrated. He doesn't
know what's going on. His wife is losing her mind.
He's stuck out in the middle of nowhere. He just
had a heart attack.

Speaker 2 (01:02:27):
Yeah. Well, then doctor Princess comes to the house to
evaluate Howard because that's his cardiologist, and he relays the
story again about what happened when Nancy and that the soldier.
He provides a name this time. He says that the
guy's name was Theooron, and that Theoron was driving he
didn't know the road well enough he crashed and killed

(01:02:49):
them both. But he says that a couple of weeks
before the crash, Beverly was standing on that spot and
had a frightened episode where she predicted the crash was
going to happen. He says that he's done various tests
on Beverly to see if she's psychic. She passed all
the tests, just fine, she's normal. He doesn't know what
her psychic abilities really are. And then Howard he's explaining

(01:03:12):
to the doctor about all this crazy shit that's happening
at Heather Cottage, and the Doctor's like, it's all got
logical explanations, like it's I'm sure you probably just left
the acolyte on my mistake, you know, like come on,
And then Howard is frustrated, I think by the doctor's response.

(01:03:36):
So Howard's like, we're out of here, like this is it?
Like this is it? Like we're leaving. And he tells
Angela we're out of here. We're gonna leave tonight. We're
just gonna leave, and Angela begs him for them to stay.
She even says to him, I will totally let you
make love to me right now. We can just stay
right and and I don't know what he did with that,

(01:04:00):
but he just goes, sure, okay, well.

Speaker 1 (01:04:02):
Stay, yeah, whatever as you wish.

Speaker 2 (01:04:05):
Yeah, I mean we could get killed in our sleep.
But that's perfectly.

Speaker 1 (01:04:08):
Fine, y right, There's obviously there's someone standing out in
the yard or someone who has the access to the house.

Speaker 2 (01:04:17):
But I think that the creepiest part for me was
that night. Of course, the laughter continues again. But that
night Howard gets up because of the laughter, and he
sees that the attic light is turned back on again,
which okay, so that's creepy enough, but he sees that
the door to the attic is partially open, but there's

(01:04:39):
no He goes over and checks it out and there's
nobody there, and that part was creepy to me. But
then he says that he finds Angela out on the lawn.
She tells Howard that she really likes it out here,
that the man on the lawn is that he's good person,
he doesn't wish them any harm, and that he was
maybe in the attic and maybe he left the door
open and left the light on. But and Howard is

(01:05:03):
I think at this point, Howard's probably on the verge
of a nervous breakdown. I think, on the cusp of it. Yeah,
but that the attic door and the light being on
was really kind of eerie to me.

Speaker 1 (01:05:17):
Yeah, I'm telling you you got some repressed attic stuff
going on, some acts you need to get hypnotized.

Speaker 2 (01:05:24):
I'm an attic attic.

Speaker 1 (01:05:30):
Before we go any further. How funny is it that
the doctor does test for to see if she's psychic?
Like that's the real thing, Like why didn't anyone in
the history of ever do that before? And then we
would know if being psychic was real.

Speaker 2 (01:05:46):
And the thing is he's he's a cardiologist. What would
he know about it?

Speaker 1 (01:05:54):
I tested her, she's not psychic.

Speaker 2 (01:05:56):
Yeah, I can see him like his test would be
I've got the spoon, make it bend. Yeah, okay, you're not,
let me go on. It reminded me of it was
one of the Friday the thirteenth, I think it was
seven Friday thirteen seven where the psychic girl is at
Camp Crystal Lake and she's brought along the doctor and

(01:06:18):
the doctor's like doing all these tests with her with
the spoon and cards, and he's like, I think you're psychic,
but you really gotta be careful, be careful with what
the psychic ability. That was crazy. Yeah, that's a that
was a jump the shark moment of Friday the thirteenth,

(01:06:39):
a psychic girl fighting Jason.

Speaker 1 (01:06:42):
They had lots of jump.

Speaker 2 (01:06:46):
Yeah, they did, like you mention earlier. The Constable comes
after that night, he gets the constable come in. The
Constable is kind of like the doctor, none of this
is supernatural. It's all it's all got a logical explanation.
But the Constable he makes a really good point because
what happens is is the Constable seems to think that

(01:07:07):
there's somebody messing with them, like a local troublemaker. He
also suggests that maybe possibly Beverly could be psychic. But
he's asking about Howard's neighbors, and Howard explains that they've
already met Arthur and the artist guy that was a dick,
and that they've met Arthur's housekeeper, Missus Drummond, And they

(01:07:29):
tell him that they found they met her and she
was on her bicycle. And he's like, wait a minute,
Missus Drummond was on a bicycle, Like, yeah, she was
riding around on her bike. He was, well, that's really
weird because her house is way across the town and
she works at Arthur's house, but she goes home, you know,
after her shift. It would be too far for her

(01:07:50):
to ride her bike from Arthur's house all the way
back to her house. He's like, this is really odd
Missus Drummond. Like the way he's making got mister drum
wouldn't be ridding a bike?

Speaker 1 (01:08:01):
Well, her husband picks her up, right.

Speaker 2 (01:08:03):
Yeah, that's the other thing. He's like, yeah, she gets
rides back and forth, So why would she be on
a bike out riding? It doesn't make any sense. So
that's not Missus Drummond. And so Howard he's like wait
a minute, Like okay, wait a minute. So then he
goes to Arthur's house and I think I texted you
right after this scene. He goes to Arthur's house, knocks

(01:08:23):
on the door, and a woman comes to the door,
and he goes, hey, I'm here to see Missus Drummond.
She goes, well, I am Missus Drummond. He's like, no,
you're not. She's like, yes, I am. He's no, you're not,
Missus Drummond. I want to see Missus Drummond, the older
lady that rides around on a bicycle that I met
you a few weeks ago. She's like, no, I'm the

(01:08:44):
only woman here. There's no other woman. I don't know
who you're talking about with riding a bike. I'm Missus
Drummond and I'm Arthur's caretaker. And he's like, this is
just getting weird. So Arthur comes to the door and
Arthur's asking what's up. He explains what's happening. He describes
what a woman looks like to Arthur. Arthur goes and
gets a photograph. He brings it over to Arthur, brings
it over to Howard and he goes, is this is

(01:09:07):
what she looks like? And Howard's like, yes, that's the
same woman. He's like, this is crazy. She died five
years ago. She was the she was the previous owner
of this house. When my mom was alive, she was
the previous owner. And she's been dead for five years.
He's like, so you really are seeing a ghost like
that old lady on a bicycle? Is that lady's ghost?

(01:09:29):
And and and Howard's like, okay, that's okay, that's He's
so far out of it. He's like, okay, that's a ghost.
Who whatever? Who is she? And he's wondering like if
if she isn't Missus Drummond and she's riding around a bike,
who is she? He doesn't. He doesn't know if she's
really this ghost that Arthur is saying she is. But

(01:09:53):
so now he wants to figure out like who that
lady was on the bike and if she has something
to do with the hauntings that's going on, like maybe
she's one addressing of like a man and just showing
up times of the night. So so so Howard gets
really excited that maybe this is a lead into what's
really happening. At the same time, Arthur gets ecstatic because

(01:10:13):
now he's going to contact the National Ghost Institute or yeah,
that's a real ghost on his property or whatever in town.
But that was that texted you. Right after that, I
was like, oh my god, this is Drummond doesn't ride
a bike or something like that. This is crazy.

Speaker 1 (01:10:31):
Yeah it was. I did not see it coming.

Speaker 2 (01:10:34):
Yeah, that was one of those moments I just.

Speaker 1 (01:10:37):
Yeah, I mean, knowing the uh how the how it
ends and hearing you retell it, I'm like, there's some
holes here.

Speaker 2 (01:10:46):
Yeah there is, uh and we'll talk about that because
there's some things I don't really understand.

Speaker 1 (01:10:50):
Yeah, like it, I guess we'll get to it.

Speaker 2 (01:10:53):
Yeah, that doesn't make any sense to me. That part
but but I don't know. A few nights later, Angela
has another nightmare. This is the part where you were
talking about where she sees this man in her dream
sitting at a desk writing a letter by candlelight. The
desk happens to be the same one that's sitting downstairs

(01:11:13):
in the den. So they both, in the middle of
night go downstairs check out the desk and Howard finds
a piece of paper like wedged behind one of the drawers,
and it's a letter addressed to a woman named Emmaline.
And in the letter, the soldier says that Emmaline betrayed
him by marrying a Yank and American. He says that

(01:11:33):
Emmaline's sister wouldn't tell him where she's at, but her
sister is dead now, and he says in the letter,
if it takes him a lifetime, he's gonna find Emmaline.
And he signs it as Theiron Hastings. So, if you recall,
Theiron is the guy that was killed with Nancy in
the car accident. So Howard asks what Angela's mother's name was,

(01:11:55):
and she says it was Emmaline.

Speaker 1 (01:12:00):
Big surprise there.

Speaker 2 (01:12:01):
Yeah, So the question is is her mother the target
of a deranged stalker.

Speaker 1 (01:12:07):
Right, because yeah, if you remember the backstory. Her backstory
is she's English, yes, and the dad died and the
mother ran off to the States.

Speaker 2 (01:12:20):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (01:12:22):
Yeah, So it looks like it's all wrapping around it.
Does Maybe she lived in this cottage.

Speaker 2 (01:12:28):
Yes, exactly, And that's kind of where we're headed into
as you get into the books of Finale. Howard's convinced
that there's danger at Heather Cottage. He's convinced that he
has to leave, so he's trying to convince Angela to leave.
He notifies the constable and says, hey, this is stuff

(01:12:50):
is happening. I think that there's somebody, you know, bothering us.
But he goes to a mechanic in town and he
gets a block and tackle and it's just so crazy.
He buys a seat belt. Can you imagine just going
to the hardware store and say, hey, I've seen to
pick up a seat belt.

Speaker 1 (01:13:07):
Yeah, a seat belt.

Speaker 2 (01:13:08):
I just see a seat belt. But that was a thing,
I guess back then. So you could just buy a seatbelt.

Speaker 1 (01:13:14):
Well yeah, because they didn't come with the cars, right.

Speaker 2 (01:13:17):
All your own, install your own seatbelt. Yeah. So he
buys a seat belt, and he gets a block and tackle,
and he creates this little trap near the edge of
the cliff where the stairs go down to the ocean.
He sets up to this trap. It's kind of like
a noos It'll it'll uh, it'll grab some I think
by the foot, like one of those traps.

Speaker 1 (01:13:36):
I would say, just picture bugs, money or something.

Speaker 2 (01:13:39):
Yeah, and it would. It would pick them up and
swing them like it swings swings them out. So I
think it grabs them by the foot game swings. We're
talking like Vietcong ship here, Like this is total rambo
viat cons. So he's making this trap and he sets
it up, and the next day Howard gets a blessing

(01:14:01):
from his doctor that he can travel back to New York.
He can go back to a normal, routine life. He's
so happy. He goes to Angeley's like we're free, We're
going back to New York. And she's like, ain't having it.
Ain't happening. We're staying right here. Yeah, we're staying. We're
staying right here. Her stuff is getting worse. She's she's

(01:14:22):
starting to sleepwalk almost every night. She's starting to go
towards the cliff, stairs. He's worried about her out there
because she could get caught in the trap that he's
set out there. He doesn't want her out just prancing
around all night, possibly getting h getting caught in the trap.
She tells Howard that she's seeing the man out there,
that he doesn't have a face, which is really weird.

(01:14:44):
I kept thinking of Michael Myers, you know, didn't have
a face, like just a shape. Yeah, And he's again
tells her, Hey, we're going to go to New York.
We're gonna leave right now. It's like three in the morning.
And she's like, no, we're not gonna do that, and
they don't, and well.

Speaker 1 (01:14:59):
She he goes back into her comato's state and she's like,
I think I have cancer.

Speaker 2 (01:15:03):
Yes, yes. He goes back to her formal state of
being paranoid depressed, and that's when Howard calls doctor Armstrong
in and Armstrong agrees to come. He's gonna stay at
the house and he's gonna spend a few nights there
and try to get her out of this depressive state.
And Howard tells Armstrong all about the man, the desk dream,

(01:15:25):
the angry letter, all that stuff, and Armstrong basically just
says it's all a hoax, like it's it's it can
be explained logically, like none of this is none of
this is really happening to you. Man, you're you're crazy.
He really does kind of suggest that that he's crazy. Yeah,
and he starts he kind of starts siding with Angela,
which I thought was kind of weird. He starts siding

(01:15:47):
with her on a lot of the stuff, like saying,
maybe you're the maybe you're the problem here, right and
by the books in You're like okay, now let's see
where we're going now. Yeah, so going into the books
finale here, I'm losing my voice. Uh so that the
final night in the house, Armstrong awakens Howard in the

(01:16:08):
middle of the night. This time it's you know, it's
somebody different. It's Armstrong waking up in the middle of
the night, and he's screaming that Angela has gone sleepwalking.
And he warns Howard that we can't wake her up
because he can't wake up a sleepwalkers. It's supposed to
be dangerous, cause.

Speaker 1 (01:16:24):
Yeah, not her walking to the edge of the cliff.
That's not dangerous, dowalker.

Speaker 2 (01:16:31):
But yeah, you're not supposed to, you know, wake them up,
and and so they run after her instead, And so
the two of them race outside. They spot Angela at
the cliff's edge, and Howard sees right and behind her
is the the dark clothed man, and then it seems
as though Angela has been tossed over the cliff. So

(01:16:53):
Howard's like, the guy was real, he just killed Angela
and he runs after him, and the stairs has like
a little platform before it goes down, and he falls
kind of like through the platform, and he's supposed to die,
is the idea, but he doesn't. He hangs on, pulls

(01:17:13):
himself back up, and then as he's grabbing onto the man,
he realizes that the man is really a bunch of wire.

Speaker 1 (01:17:22):
It's a wire frame and a jacket.

Speaker 2 (01:17:25):
Yes, like a yeah, like a like it's just nothing.
It's it's just a metal frame. And then from behind
he can hear that his trap has just went off
and that it's caught two people, and he can hear
go ahead.

Speaker 1 (01:17:42):
No, they they talk. He hears talking first, is he
down there?

Speaker 2 (01:17:48):
Yes, that's right, yeah, And and then he hears the
trap go off. But what's really weird about it is
it's it was like on an old like gnarled tree.
So when the trap goes up and starts swinging two
people instead of one, and because of that, they start
fighting I guess, in the trap, and then the tree

(01:18:10):
breaks and then they're gone.

Speaker 1 (01:18:16):
In the ocean and.

Speaker 2 (01:18:19):
They're dead. And so the end of the book is
like one of those old crime no our thrillers where
the guy's writing at the end like, I'm in the
death house now because of what's happened. All the stuff
has now led to me being put to death. And
so what happened is Howard has been sentenced to prison

(01:18:41):
for killing his wife and her lover, Armstrong. And that's
the that's the the secret is Armstrong was kind of
behind it with because he fell in Angela fell in
love with him, and Armstrong had devised a way to
make it seem like Howard was going insane. Drive Howard insane,

(01:19:04):
he would end up dying or being put away. And
then yeah, with this heart attack, they were trying to
create him another heart attack that would kill him and
then the two of them could live happily. Ever after.

Speaker 1 (01:19:15):
I got it, I gotta say I was devastated that
that was the ending. I I it's a Gothic romance, right.
I was like, I loved how much he loved her.
It was very romantic, you know. I wanted them to
to make it out and to find out that the

(01:19:35):
whole plot was just herd flying to him the whole time,
stabbing him in the back.

Speaker 2 (01:19:42):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:19:42):
Oh that was brutal. The guy didn't deserve.

Speaker 2 (01:19:45):
It, He didn't, he was He treated her like a queen.

Speaker 1 (01:19:49):
You were right, you were right. Why is he with
this girl? Man?

Speaker 2 (01:19:54):
Why why would he do that to himself? Well? Yeah,
he's ruined everyone's life by by basically loving her. Uh yeah,
I just and I mean what else does she I mean,
I mean he's obviously a very successful architect, he's loaded.
What else does she want in life? He loves her,
He's given her this great stuff, yet she's that's my

(01:20:18):
dog in the background. I was like, what is that whip?
That's her tamble? But what else? Does you know? What
else does she really want? But she wants Armstrong, wants
the doctor, and he conveniently lives an hour away in
a flat, so she's she was still able to go
see him on the train. I'm sure that they talked
to her, because that scene is left out of the book.

(01:20:38):
Her going to visit him.

Speaker 1 (01:20:40):
Yeah, when she would go to town, she was going there
and I think he would come up to her too.

Speaker 2 (01:20:46):
I think so.

Speaker 1 (01:20:47):
Oh he was doing at night obviously.

Speaker 2 (01:20:49):
Yeah, he's And what they explained was the laughter was
a tape recorder that they were playing into the wall
there so he could hear it.

Speaker 1 (01:20:59):
And she had a buzzer. She's laying in bed pretending
to sleep, pushing this buzzer driving him crazy.

Speaker 2 (01:21:05):
I was so mad at the end of it was
it was really cool. And the accident was a was
a recording as well, the sounds of the car. The
whole thing was a ruse. The desk and the note
all made up like it was all just made up
to make it seem like there was a guy named
thereon that was maybe harassing everyone. They made up. Every

(01:21:28):
single little detail in the book they made up. But
I think what you were referring to earlier that was
a whole was why why did the old woman who
they paid to show up and pretend like she was
just some old woman that didn't exist? Why did she
look like Arthur's pictures?

Speaker 1 (01:21:50):
Right? Where did they get the picture of the lady
who used to own the house.

Speaker 2 (01:21:54):
Why would they do that? That part doesn't unless Arthur
is just so hell bent on steeing a ghost he
just goes, oh, yeah, that's gotta be Well, no, that
would work either. I don't know, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:22:09):
Who it was psychologically planted into his brain.

Speaker 2 (01:22:12):
And well that's the other thing too, is the psychic
part of it. Is Beverly really psychic?

Speaker 1 (01:22:18):
No? No, no, she's not psychic. I mean the doctor
did test Eric, did you miss that part?

Speaker 2 (01:22:27):
I don't understand how she would have known that there
was going to be a crash in the in the curve.

Speaker 1 (01:22:32):
Well, they say, I think the cop explains that, and
he's like, he's like, that's the most dangerous curve in England, Like,
of course someone's gonna crash there someday.

Speaker 2 (01:22:44):
Okay, yeah, well there was there was that scene, and
then there was the one with the stroller that she
apparently predicted, but it could have just been, hey, somebody's
going to cross the street. You get ran every one day?

Speaker 1 (01:22:56):
Yeah, yeah, I think yeah. The constable explains it is that,
like it's people making the connections after it happens, like no, one. Ever,
it never stops anything, it never does anything. We're like, like, oh,
she didn't she wasn't she scared that day?

Speaker 2 (01:23:13):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:23:13):
And three days later, so we get hit by a car,
like a big deal.

Speaker 2 (01:23:16):
She Yeah, she could have just been suffering some kind
of mental condition, which maybe why she ran out of
the house originally and then forgot that she'd even did that.

Speaker 1 (01:23:24):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (01:23:25):
That could just be part of it. I don't know
if any really other other holes really?

Speaker 1 (01:23:33):
Uh, I mean, it all kind of went together in
a perfect storm. How did they know that their local
town doctor was gonna be a ghost guy?

Speaker 2 (01:23:41):
You know? Yeah, yeah, that's true.

Speaker 1 (01:23:44):
Were they just banking on the the British loving the ghosts.
We'll just pick some rural place and they're gonna be
all about ghosts and then they do.

Speaker 2 (01:23:55):
Yeah. I The thing I was wondering at the end
was is Howard really being sentenced to prison or does
he have enough evidence to suggest that they were just
tormenting him.

Speaker 1 (01:24:06):
I think that he was going to trial. I think
that they arrested him for murder. But he says that
his lawyer has all the evidence. That says because they
found the tape recorder and the microphone and all that.

Speaker 2 (01:24:20):
Yeah, and they Yeah, so he can make the evidence
that they were having an affair and they just wanted
him out. Yeah. So yeah, So what was your at
the end of the day. Is this a Gothic book?

Speaker 1 (01:24:38):
Yes, I think it is. I think it is. I
think you got the the remote location, you got the
pseudos supernatural, you do have uh two, you got two
main characters instead of the one, which is the usual
Gothic trope. Yeah, so that's a little different. And uh, I.

Speaker 2 (01:25:04):
Think you had read it. I think you read a
gothic and reviewed it recently. Had a male main character, yeah,
the Castle Dark Yeah, that one and this one mostly
that is the main character is Howard.

Speaker 1 (01:25:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:25:17):
Yeah. So it's it's got to the characters, it's got
the uh, the seaside house, and it's got the one.

Speaker 1 (01:25:28):
Light mm hmm. It does it even even has the
one light in the story, not just on the cover, right.
I guess the question is if it's not Gothic, what
is it?

Speaker 2 (01:25:39):
Well, it could just be a suspenseful mystery. In fact,
I think I've got it here. This this book which
is was written I think in the uh it was
written in nineteen twenty five. It was packaged by Dell,
just like yours as a as a gothic. I don't

(01:26:01):
know if you can see that without the glare hold on. Yeah.
The Red Lamp is Uh is a nineteen twenty five novel.
It's a murder suspense mystery. It was packaged as a
as a gothic here in nineteen seventy two. I think

(01:26:21):
the original title it was called the Mystery Lamp, but
they they changed it and made it look supernatural, but
kind of similar, kind of similar. There's a big house
that they go and rent and there ends up being
a a a mystery or regarding this lover, and then
there's a uh, there's this red lamp that's harassing them

(01:26:44):
in the middle of the night and they this keeps
popping on and they can see it and they're like
why does it keep happening? And it kind of drives
them crazy. But there's a murder, you know, at the end,
there's a murder, and I think there may be more
than one murder. But this it started out as just
a murder mystery. I mean, that's all, that's all it is.

(01:27:05):
But then when you look at it like this, you're
like Okay, wait a minute, it could be a Gothic,
Like I can totally see why the publisher made it
a gothic. Yeah, I think, I'm I'm not calling it
a Gothic. I don't think because I'm thinking of it.
And it's original, it's original incarnation of being just a
murder mystery. But even though the murder takes place at

(01:27:26):
the very end, there's not really much of a mystery
with a murder, but it's just the stuff that's leading
up to it. Yeah, and there's a lot and really
it's written for me. It's almost written like like a
female author wrote it, because so many female authors like
Edna Sherry Gosh, I can't even think of names right now,

(01:27:50):
but the stuff that Starkhouse Press puts out almost monthly
from a female writer has that same kind of feel
to it. It's it's it's written kind of like this.
There's things that happen mysteriously in the house or on
the property, and it leads to questions about motivations for
murder or suspicions about who's who's got a jealousy for

(01:28:12):
somebody else.

Speaker 1 (01:28:13):
Mh.

Speaker 2 (01:28:14):
But it could easily you could easily say, Okay, well,
that's a Gothic because it has a mysterious atmosphere to
the house. The house seems cavernous. There seems like there's
secrets within the house. There's always footsteps in the middle
of the night, like there's somebody off to kill someone
or harass somebody. So there's different different ways you can
think of it. But it's it's really just in my opinion,

(01:28:36):
it's just a just a mystery, really a mystery thriller
kind of thing.

Speaker 1 (01:28:41):
Well, when I was thinking of when you I showed
some of those Mary Roberts Reinharts in a book call
and you said that it's there was actually a classic
mystery that they repackaged. Yeah, I was thinking about it.
I was like, you know, maybe that what those books
are are like proto Gothic, like like you like, let's say,

(01:29:03):
like the Ramones of the first punk band, right, so
what of the Stooges. So the Stooges were the punk
before it was punk, So maybe the Mary Roberts Reinhard
was the Gothics before they were officially called, before they
officially gotten this the template, you.

Speaker 2 (01:29:20):
Know, yeah, exactly. Yeah, writers like that. There's another one,
Charlotte Armstrong. I know you've probably heard that name, or
you might even have a Charlotte Armstrong. But same thing
was she was writing around the same time. I think
this one, this was actually one for later ones, but
she was writing just mysteries and they end up, yeah,

(01:29:41):
they end up just making it, you know, as a
Gothic and it made this one. It's probably not the same,
but a lot of them they changed the name of
the title to make it sound like a Gothic, but
it's really like this one says Charlotte Armstrong, the Queen
of Suspense.

Speaker 1 (01:29:58):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (01:29:58):
So, like you said there, it could be the start
of the building foundations of Gothic.

Speaker 1 (01:30:05):
I was just saying, I almost picked that book when
you asked me which one we because we both had
it and I was looking I was looking up the
reviews and they were not favorable, and they said that
it like it really wasn't Gothic at all, right.

Speaker 2 (01:30:19):
And there's there's a lot of those books like that
that you read, you know, like, Okay, that's not Gothic.
It's just got to cover to make it look like that.
But what I've always been what I find interesting about
Gothic sometimes is they do leave the idea of the
supernatural possibly being there, Like at the end of the book,

(01:30:40):
the main characters say, yeah, but what about that part
of it? Or what about this? How did that happen?
And then you're always kind of like, there's possibly a
supernatural aspect to it. Yeah, and they kind of leave
it open for that. And I like that part of
it where it is open ended at the end with
the possibility of something supernatural happening.

Speaker 1 (01:31:01):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (01:31:02):
I think those were really good.

Speaker 1 (01:31:04):
Yeah, yeah, I love them. I've only read one that
I was like, this is terrible, and you read it also,
and it was because you did a review on the
on the blog The Hogfight The Fog Hides the Fury.
Do you remember my one?

Speaker 2 (01:31:19):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:31:19):
Yeah, that was that was so boring, and they like
they just built up like her backstory was like most
of the book before it got to anything creepy. You remember, Yeah,
You're like, I read somebody what you're talking about.

Speaker 2 (01:31:35):
I remember that this one. This one here is again.
This was nineteen sixty six and it it really isn't
a Gothic but they make it out to look like
it is the Secret of Canfield House by Florence Heard
amazing book. It's so good, Like this book is amazing,

(01:31:58):
and it's really just a suspense thriller. She ends up again,
I think she ends up renting or moving into a
mansion to take care of it while some relative is
out of town and a guy in town is kind
of like stalking her and he just he just won't
go away, and he ends up kind of invading the house.

(01:32:22):
So it's almost kind of like a home invasion thing
to it. I reviewed it on the blog and this
is probably even though it's not a Gothic, I still
have it in my Gothic section just because it's it
looks like one. I mean, it looks like one. But
if you get a chance to read it, Secret of
Canfield House by Florence Hurd a really good book. And
I will add it's the I think it's only the

(01:32:44):
second Gothic I've ever read where the main character, the
vulnerable female, gets a firearm at the end. Oh yeah,
I was like, Okay, that's that's pretty cool.

Speaker 1 (01:32:56):
And then that one was who was the author of
that one.

Speaker 2 (01:33:00):
Her name is Florence Heard h.

Speaker 1 (01:33:02):
U Org, so it was written that's even cooler. So
it's written by a woman. Then she ends up with
the gun, like, yeah, she has a gun at the end,
like this ain't happening.

Speaker 2 (01:33:12):
Yeah, this ain't This isn't happening. Yeah, I'm pretty sure
that's the one that has the gun. There's two Gothics
I read. I just read one recently, and she had
a gun, which which totally unusual for Gothic.

Speaker 1 (01:33:25):
I think anytime, yeah, anytime that they're they're fighting back,
I think is cool and not not usual.

Speaker 2 (01:33:32):
The other thing that I like about Gothics is if
they are set in the twentieth century or middle of
twentieth century, I don't I'm not crazy about the seventeen
hundreds and eighteen hundreds Gothics because I don't like the
stage coaches and the dinner parties that they have to
go through, and all the musical routines that they have
to go through. I don't like any of that stuff.

(01:33:53):
I just want the story. Yeah, I like them to
be set in the time that they write them, So
it's the sixties, seventies, whatever I want it to be.
That I don't want to I don't want to read
seventeen hundred and eighteen hundreds Gothics. That are set in
that time periods what I should say? I don't want
to it. And there's a lot of them, and I
probably got some here that are set in that time period,

(01:34:15):
and I just it just doesn't speak to me as
much as the other ones.

Speaker 1 (01:34:20):
No, it doesn't. It doesn't sound as appealing.

Speaker 2 (01:34:23):
No, it's not.

Speaker 1 (01:34:25):
I think if you're going to go that, if you're
going to go that far back, then the should just
be a gothic horror.

Speaker 2 (01:34:30):
I was going to ask you, do you think that
this book squeaks By as a as a soft horror novel?
Is it a minor horror novel?

Speaker 1 (01:34:37):
Oh? Man? This is like.

Speaker 2 (01:34:40):
This is.

Speaker 1 (01:34:42):
This is a this is dangerous ground here because I've
already been rolling around in my head like wanting to
talk about the difference between horror and thriller. Yeah, so
so to me, without going into the specifics of that,
I think that this is more thrill. I wouldn't call
this a horror at all.

Speaker 2 (01:35:03):
Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, And I struggle with that too,
horror and thriller. And I struggled the same thing, like
what do I call this? And I don't know if
there's a definitive answer.

Speaker 1 (01:35:16):
No, No, it and it wouldn't Yeah, it wouldn't matter
you just whatever whatever works for you. You know, call
it that. Arguing over whether a story is this or
that is not really that important. But it is fun
to talk about, that's for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:35:35):
Yes, yeah it is. So anything else you want to
say about this book before we look at some book
covers real.

Speaker 1 (01:35:43):
Fast, other than just saying that it was awesome, I
really I loved it. And even though like I hated
the ending, I hated her for what she did to him,
it was great. It was I was all in the
whole time. I was like, I love this. It's got
the atmosphere, it's yeah, just the mystery of if what's

(01:36:07):
really happening, what's really going on? Is it the conspiracy?
Is that the ghost You're pulled along just like he is,
back and forth. You're like, oh no, not, it's not
the ghosts. Somebody's messing with somebody that hates Americans. Typical
typical bridge.

Speaker 2 (01:36:21):
Right, So two thumbs up from.

Speaker 1 (01:36:25):
You, Yes, two thumbs up.

Speaker 2 (01:36:27):
Awesome. Yeah, I would say the same thing for me too.
You said the magical words there. The book made you
feel something, and I think that's the that's the measuring
stick for me is did it make me feel anything?
Some books does don't make you feel anything. It's like
I read it, it was okay, he tossed it to
the side, and you move on to the next one. Yeah,
that's that's almost disposable fiction to me. But if it

(01:36:49):
makes you feel something, then then I think the authors,
you know, did a good job with it. So you
felt something. I felt something like you, like, I felt
angry with with her what she did. And and it
truly did have some creepy moments, you know, it really did.
I think if if I was reading this in the winter,
I think I would have felt a little bit more

(01:37:11):
creeped out with it. But middle of summer it's hot,
I didn't feel as creepy.

Speaker 1 (01:37:15):
I don't know. It was raining the whole time I
was reading it. It was thunderstorms. It's thunderstorming right now.

Speaker 2 (01:37:20):
Actually, oh wow, okay.

Speaker 1 (01:37:22):
Perfect. And also that's only point out that it's actually
it's good good, not like funny, trashy good. Sometimes I
always just say good, and I don't know if people
know what I'm saying well either or but it's like
yeah it's good. This is like, yeah, it's different very well,
it's not silly.

Speaker 2 (01:37:42):
It's a different good than the butcher terror truckers.

Speaker 1 (01:37:45):
Exactly, not that kind of good.

Speaker 2 (01:37:48):
Yeah, that's what you're saying. Yeah, so I highly recommend it.
To my knowledge, you're gonna have to buy this one
as a used book because it's it's not in a reprint.
There's no modern addition of it that I know of, so, uh,
you have to have to hit the used bookstore for
this one. So, yeah, you want to show some book
covers absolutely fast now that you went and grabbed them.

Speaker 1 (01:38:11):
Yeah, so you want to do one and then the other.

Speaker 2 (01:38:16):
Since you're going to enlarge it, maybe you should them
all together. Okay, so don't you that and forth?

Speaker 1 (01:38:22):
You want me to go first for you?

Speaker 2 (01:38:23):
Yeah, I want to see yours, show me yours first.
Let's get the and you got them all on bags.
You get the bag goods.

Speaker 1 (01:38:33):
Only one is not in a bag because I just
got it.

Speaker 2 (01:38:37):
Like, these are my precious, these are pious.

Speaker 1 (01:38:41):
Let me make sure I get the lighting.

Speaker 2 (01:38:43):
Here, ah, the jewels, the dagger. Yeah I can see it, yeah, yeah,
I can see it right there perfectly.

Speaker 1 (01:38:50):
Okay, So I haven't read this one, but I did.
I just I just showed it in the recent hall,
so it's probably not a good choice to grab. But
I love that it takes place in Istanbul.

Speaker 2 (01:39:00):
Yeah, that's interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:39:01):
It's very it's very different. I have one that's also
takes place in India.

Speaker 2 (01:39:06):
Man, I should have grabbed that one.

Speaker 1 (01:39:08):
Maybe I'll pause it and I'll go grab it. But yeah,
I don't know. It just it just looked, Uh what
is that? What is that? Just looks for it. It
looks exotic, exotic adventure Gothic.

Speaker 2 (01:39:25):
Yes see, it almost could almost come across the Sword
of Sorcery in a way if you just had some muscles,
the jeweled the dagger.

Speaker 1 (01:39:34):
Yeah, like a Talbot Munday or something. This is a
Talbot Mundy Gothic.

Speaker 2 (01:39:38):
Right, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:39:41):
Uh? And then I got this is one I was
hoping you had because I've been dying to read this. Uh,
Decoy and Diamonds, Natalie Gates. So this is a it's
a Gothic that takes place on a cruise ship.

Speaker 2 (01:39:57):
Really, yeah, okay, we're gonna have to read that. Let
me see if I got a scan of it while
you're doing that. And diamonds, the Koy and diamonds.

Speaker 1 (01:40:10):
Here is one that I I just got not too
long ago, and I don't know anything about it.

Speaker 2 (01:40:18):
I've got I've got decoyn Diamonds as a scanned version
so I can read it.

Speaker 1 (01:40:22):
Awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:40:23):
Do we need to do that one next? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:40:25):
Well just we're just we're just gonna that's it. Our
channels are just taken over by gothics suspense.

Speaker 2 (01:40:32):
You had me a cruise ship man.

Speaker 1 (01:40:35):
That's when when I found it, I was like, I
can't believe I've never seen Gothic that takes place, not
in an old spooky house.

Speaker 2 (01:40:43):
Yeah, yeah, all right, what you got?

Speaker 1 (01:40:46):
All Right, I don't I don't know anything about this
portrait of a man with red hair, Q Wallpole.

Speaker 2 (01:40:53):
That's interesting. You got a male figure on the cover.

Speaker 1 (01:40:56):
Yeah, and it's got uh the male author with his
real name up there.

Speaker 2 (01:41:03):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:41:03):
So it's probably, I might guess, would be similar to
this drafted an old inn by a madman hester must
escape or become his human sacrifice.

Speaker 2 (01:41:15):
Oh okay, cool.

Speaker 1 (01:41:16):
So maybe there's some occult stuff there. Maybe he worships
the devil, I hope.

Speaker 2 (01:41:20):
So maybe this one.

Speaker 1 (01:41:26):
Yeah, I don't know. Out of Darkness another one I
haven't read yet. Margery Davenport.

Speaker 2 (01:41:31):
Yeah. Yeah, I can't remember who she is. I think
that's a pseudonym. I think I liked.

Speaker 1 (01:41:38):
Yeah, I got this one. Well, I mean I'd buy
all of them I see them, but I especially like
that it was it's definitely gothic, but she's not in
a flowing dress running from a building or anything.

Speaker 2 (01:41:50):
Right. Yeah, so it's got a horror cover.

Speaker 1 (01:41:54):
Yeah, from the Black Abyss of the Past, evil rose
up to claim her. So that sounds like a horror
plug right there.

Speaker 2 (01:42:01):
It us.

Speaker 1 (01:42:03):
And then we got Yeah, so here's the Charlotte Armstrong
you were talking about. And this is really cool because
you just don't see this this often, but so dream
Walker Charlotte Armstrong and it's a Gothic double.

Speaker 2 (01:42:17):
Ah yeah, I haven't seen that before.

Speaker 1 (01:42:18):
Mark of the Hand an.

Speaker 2 (01:42:20):
Ace gothic double.

Speaker 1 (01:42:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:42:23):
I wonder how many of those they did. That's the
first one I've ever seen like that, honestly.

Speaker 1 (01:42:29):
Yeah. Yeah, I couldn't. I couldn't believe it.

Speaker 2 (01:42:31):
Wow, that is cool.

Speaker 1 (01:42:33):
Yeah, here's one that I have read, Old House of
Fear Russell Kirk. So this is this is more on
the borderline of Gothic horror. Okay, So it's like it's
got the it's like a crime book too. I don't know,

(01:42:54):
it's like a borderline it's a borderline genre genre book. Yeah,
but it's very it's spooky, and it even says the
word Gothic on the cover, so you know, legit all right.
So this one is my wife's. I don't remember she
read it or not, but this is definitely like the

(01:43:18):
horror gothic, like but the seventies version, So it's kind
of like a gothic suspense, a modern novel of Gothic
horror right there on the cover.

Speaker 2 (01:43:31):
Eric, Yeah, it's gonna say. Uh. There was a horror
movie called The Marcus Satan that was like it was.
That's not a novelization.

Speaker 1 (01:43:41):
Though, no, maybe they based it off of this book.

Speaker 2 (01:43:46):
Marcus Satan is about the inquisition of the movie, so
uh okay.

Speaker 1 (01:43:55):
And here is one other one that I've read, Howling
in the Woods by Velda Johnson. This is the first
one I ever read, and then I became in love
with it after this.

Speaker 2 (01:44:04):
Oh nice, how's that?

Speaker 1 (01:44:06):
It's awesome? She and yeah, she and here it's the
old house by the relative she's never met. Yeah, and
she goes there and meets a bunch of strange people
and there's strange noises out in the woods. She investigates
who can she trust. And what's cool about this one
is they made it into a TV movie starring what's

(01:44:30):
her name? I Dream of Genie? Uh, Barbara right, so
it has Barbara Eden in it. And then in this
in this book there the woman has an ex husband
that she's like splitting from and he eventually shows up
in the book and in the movie it's the it's

(01:44:51):
her husband from My Dream of Genie. It's so weird.
It's like, a, Yeah, they had the same actors be
in the movie and they're married in the in the movie.

Speaker 2 (01:45:03):
What a weird casting choice.

Speaker 1 (01:45:05):
Yeah, the movie was, it was a little different. I
watched it after I read it. The book is definitely
definitely better. And here's a here's a John Messman. I
love this. This is my favorite Gothic I've ever read.
The Haunting of drum Row.

Speaker 2 (01:45:19):
I had that one. I've never read it.

Speaker 1 (01:45:21):
It's awesome. It's Uh, she's in Ireland. She inherits a castle. No,
I don't I don't remember what she inherits, but it's
something like that. I think. Actually she's just going to
visit like her mema or something and mem is missing,
and ah, there she is.

Speaker 2 (01:45:41):
It's uh. Those books have all been reprinted by Cutting Edgebooks,
all the John Messman Gothics. Oh really, yes, you can
get those in digital or brand new physical paperbacks.

Speaker 1 (01:45:51):
Oh that's awesome. They're awesome. I every I've loved every
Claudet and Nicole and then since yeah, since you mentioned it,
The Castle of Garrick here, Yeah, Nicholas Manta ross mancerat
that I did a review of, and this was sort
of in the same ilk of The Shadow Guests where
it was it was pretty literary and written from the

(01:46:12):
male perspective. That was very different and it was definitely
more of a thriller. But it says famous romantic gyic
right there on the covernment.

Speaker 2 (01:46:23):
I remember you were viewing that one this here recently,
I think, so it must be real. Yeah, it must be.

Speaker 1 (01:46:31):
Those are those are my ten. I guess I'll maybe
I won't grab the I won't grab the Indian one.
I'll cut it out, unst you really want to see it?

Speaker 2 (01:46:41):
Yeah, let's see it.

Speaker 1 (01:46:42):
Okay, all right, I get I grabbed you we do
the other one? Really fast.

Speaker 2 (01:46:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:46:50):
Okay, So here's the the India one, the Song of India.

Speaker 2 (01:46:55):
Okay, so she's she's running from the.

Speaker 1 (01:46:59):
The temple whatever you call that.

Speaker 2 (01:47:02):
Wow, that's wild.

Speaker 1 (01:47:04):
There's one light on this picture. Yeah. This, I was
gonna say. It's a the the re illustrated picture Gothic.
Mm hmm Mozelle Richardson.

Speaker 2 (01:47:20):
That's interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:47:21):
Yeah. And then I just real, real fast. I grabbed.
I do I have the Andre Norton Gothic? Have you read?

Speaker 2 (01:47:29):
I had that book at one point. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:47:33):
If I was gonna read, if I was gonna start
with Andre Norton, That's where I'm starting.

Speaker 2 (01:47:37):
Yeah, I've tried to read him in the past. But
or her, I should say, I haven't had that book.
I having Eddie Luck with her.

Speaker 1 (01:47:45):
Yeah, the Beast Faster she wrote the Faster. They made
it into a movie.

Speaker 2 (01:47:50):
Oh this, I didn't know that was based on a book.
I had no idea sort of loosely, very very wow.
I just uh, I'm randomly grabbed some off the shelf.
I don't even know what I grabbed. So we'll look
at them together.

Speaker 1 (01:48:04):
I'm not right.

Speaker 2 (01:48:05):
See, So I got die Jessica Die, Die, Jessica Die.
In nineteen seventy two. This is Michael Iavaloni. Ooh, and
that's a do you like the red, blue, green, or

(01:48:25):
yellow pages? What's your favorite?

Speaker 1 (01:48:29):
I get the blue blue is my favorite color. The
bluish green. I think that's more Gothic than the others.

Speaker 2 (01:48:37):
For some reason, this is a uh, this is a
beagle Gothic. Giver her to them beagle Yeah, bagele Gothic,
and it I don't know who wrote it, but there
might be Marshall Brady for some reason. I don't know why.

Speaker 1 (01:48:52):
It's like if Marcia Brady wrote a book.

Speaker 2 (01:48:55):
Now like her on the cover, like, oh okay, it's
think of Marshall Brady, like she's on vacation or something
and she's in trouble.

Speaker 1 (01:49:05):
A very Brady Gothic.

Speaker 2 (01:49:06):
A very Brady Gothic. What's that? The presence and the
real author is Richard Hubbard, so in nineteen seventy two,
that's the queens Sie Gothic. So you get almost like
two books in one. Yeah, those are big ones. I
think I reviewed this one. Of course. Dorothy Daniels was

(01:49:28):
Norman Daniel's wife. Nineteen seventy one. This was pretty good
from what I remember here's my favorite, probably my favorite
Gothic is this one, Circle of Secrets, John Messman, nineteen
seventy two. I reviewed this on the blog. It's a

(01:49:49):
really really good book. It's got a great cover too.
I really like that one. This one's another John Messman,
writing as Claude Nicole instead of Claudette Cliss of Death
in nineteen sixty eight. Again this is John Messman. Another

(01:50:09):
John Messman here writing his Claudette Nicole house at Hawk's End.
It's got a cool cover yellow. This is uh. This
is Fawcett Falset Gold Medal. I don't know how many
I did. I just grabbed a handful. Cool.

Speaker 1 (01:50:25):
I love it.

Speaker 2 (01:50:26):
This is uh. So this is one that they probably repackaged.
This is Mystery on the Moors, which was released in
nineteen sixty seven, but they changed the name to this
Gothic sounding Mystery on the Moors and published it a
year later. So probably not originally designed as a Gothic,

(01:50:49):
probably more like a historical novel, but they just like, hey,
let is try to get something out of this. I
always liked these easy eye ones because your large print, yeah,
literally easy on the eyes, pretty thick, but winter evil
that's a real author. Sharon Wagoner. I think she only

(01:51:10):
wrote like maybe two books. These may Roberts Ryan Hard books.
I have all these gothics. This one is a haunted lady.
I think this is a few stories in here. I
think I'm not mistaken. This is nineteen forty two originally,
but publishes a Gothic in seventy one. And then this

(01:51:31):
is another big one. I don't know why I grab
the big ones. House of four Windows. This is a
real author. I think Delphine Lyons again were easy. I
had large print. And last one, I don't know why
I grabbed the big ones. Nick, I don't know what.
There's that one, the glass painting. This was Victor Bannis

(01:51:55):
So Victor Bannish wrote this. This is Jane Alexander. You
see the green, big thick book. Yeah, it looks like
she's like that's like a stove, is what It always
freaked me out. It looks like it's a stove. Likes
to see.

Speaker 1 (01:52:12):
I can just see her and she's walking away from something.

Speaker 2 (01:52:16):
Yeah, it's it's she's walking away from this old stove
like they're burning up body or something in there.

Speaker 1 (01:52:20):
Oh, like the ones that.

Speaker 2 (01:52:24):
Maybe says beneath the ruins of the old French mansion,
restlessly cruel forces way to claim a young American girl.
So there you go. That's awesome, fun stuff it is.

Speaker 1 (01:52:41):
That's good. That's good.

Speaker 2 (01:52:43):
Yeah. So maybe, yeah, maybe sometime next month we can
read the other Gothic after pulp fests and all the
craziness ends.

Speaker 1 (01:52:50):
Yeah, yeah, that would that would be so much fun.
We can just one Gothic a month. I'm good with that. Yeah,
there are long discussions about things. What's about.

Speaker 2 (01:53:01):
I'm sure it'll be a huge sensation. Listeners will be
anxiously anticipating the next episode. Oh well yeah it doesn't matter. Yeah,
who cares. But so anyway, this was fun. This is good.

Speaker 1 (01:53:17):
Yeah, yeah, thanks for thanks for doing this. That was Yeah.
I'm glad you suggested it. And you know, hopefully we'll
figure I feel like maybe we the Guide to Gothics.
We we're just doing it naturally. So maybe The Guide
to Gothics is a series. We just keep talking, We
just keep talking.

Speaker 2 (01:53:37):
Yeah, yeah, through twelve books a year, I mean we
should be able to crack the code, right.

Speaker 1 (01:53:45):
Nick and Eric figure out the Gothics.

Speaker 2 (01:53:48):
Yeah, I think it's a great idea cool.

Speaker 1 (01:53:52):
Well all right, well let's sign off here. Goodbye, Goodbye everybody,
thanks for watching.

Speaker 2 (01:53:57):
Yeah, thanks for listening. You're still listening later b.