This book has it all--deaths, a coven of evil witches, ghosts, a dreadfully haunted Victorian house, children in peril, and rain storms at night. It's a great book for Halloween.
I'm referring to Chris Bohjalian's 2011 tome The Night Strangers (Crown Publishers ISBN: 978-0-307-39499-6).
I've reviewed Chris Bohjalian before and praised his writing talents. This book continues with more of the same. The volume will keep you on your toes with its shifting points of view and precise portrayal of the characters and their intentions.
It begins with a crash into a lake by the Bombardier CRJ 700 plane that Chip Linton is piloting. Four out of forty-three survive, including Chip. His copilot doesn't make it out of the plane, just like thirty-eight of the passengers. This accident crushes Chip's wish to ever fly again. He has flash-backs that petrify him, and a dead little girl (the same age as Chris's twin daughters) visits him in his blank state of being.
With the notoriety in his town in Pennsylvania, he and his family move to a Victorian house in remote northern New Hampshire. The locals greet him, his wife Emily, and his twins Halle and Garnet with open arms. The women herbalists in particular keep inserting themselves into the family's business, smothering them with dishes of vegan food and homemade medicines. Two of the women take over the girls’ lives by introducing them to their greenhouses where they grow herbs and medicinal plants. They do not know about Garnet's seizures that freeze her in another world for a spell.
Meanwhile Chris is plagued by the ghosts of Ashley and her angry father who tells Chip that his daughter needs playmates to be happy in her purgatory state. He means Chip's children. The dad is relentless in his instruction of Chip. Chip finds a hidden knife in the house that he keeps secret from his wife and girls. He contemplates the act and how to do it, and he's found once in Garnet's bedroom where both girls are sleeping together. He is woken by Emily, his wife, before he can enact his plan to kill.
Apparently this haunting has happened before with the previous owners. That and the overbearing women who are contemplating how to get the twins to themselves, for their own private plans. In Chris' quote from the book, “Secrets are rising like distant thunder clouds.”
The action builds along with inherent terror when the sociopath herbalists manipulate the girl's mother in order to sacrifice the twins in some occult ritual, needing one of the twins' blood for one of their potions in order to extend their lives.
But at the same time, another kinder herbalist offers to do a depossession on Chip, which he takes in order to get out from under the ghost girl's impatient demands. It works. But Chip is battling with his own psychosis all alone except for one of the witches who is a psychiatrist and who takes over his “treatments.”
This book is good. With a clear eye to detail, Chris writes taut action and characters as they work towards their cross-purposes. I found this story with the local library's search feature, as can you.
