The Night House by Jo Nesbø

 

(hb; 2023: YA novel. Translated from the Norwegian by Neil Smith.)

 

From the inside flap

“In the wake of his parents’ tragic deaths in a house fire, fourteen-year-old Richard Elauved has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle in the remote, insular town of Ballantyne. Richard quickly earns a reputation as an outcast, and when a classmate named Tom goes missing, everyone suspects the new, angry boy is responsible for his disappearance. No one believes him when he says the telephone booth out by the edge of the woods sucked Tom into the receiver like something out of a horror movie. No one, that is, except Karen, a beguiling fellow outsider who encourages Richard to pursue clues the police refuse to investigate. His sleuthing leads him to an abandoned house in the Mirror Forest, where he catches a glimpse of a terrifying face in the window. And then the voices begin to whisper in his ear. . .

“She’s going to burn. The girl you love is going to burn. There’s nothing you can do about it.

“When another classmate disappears, Richard must find a way to prove his innocence—and preserve his sanity—as he grapples with the dark magic that is possessing Ballantyne and pursing his destruction.

“Then again, Richard may not be the most reliable narrator of his own story.”

 

Review

House starts with a horrific, reader-hooking and icky-slurp bang and, with its tightly written and horror-effective set pieces, maintains that character-building (and sometimes twisty) pace throughout the book. The key twist at the end, noted in the book’s cover-flap description, likely won’t surprise seasoned genre readers, but it works and Nesbø makes fresh use of it in House. Set around 1990—filmmaker/FX artist Tom Savini’s remake of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) has recently been released— Nesbø’s House is a great, truly horrific-at-times coming-of-age read, one worth owning for those who appreciate turned-on-their-head terror tropes. Fans of Stephen King's early work, Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella The Metamorphosis and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (novel, 1962) might especially enjoy House.