The Basement

✍ Scribed by Wood, Bari

• Publisher: Avon Books
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 201 KB
• Category: Fiction
• City: New York, Connecticut, Connecticut.
• ISBN: 0380723050

✦ Synopsis

Living a privileged life in a fine Connecticut community, Myra Ludens becomes aware of a sinister force that resides in her basement, resists all her barricades and renovations, and has given her the power to kill.

From the dust jacket

Myra Ludens is a sweet, shy Connecticut housewife who seems to have the picture-perfect life—old family money, beautiful house, devoted husband, and an intimate circle of friends. But there's a black spot in this picture: the basement. Even after and expensive renovation, there's something about the basement in Myra's house that chills her blue blood, an air of malevolence that leaves her weak with fear. When she researches the history of her house and discover that woman named Goody Redman was hanged for witchcraft in the seventeenth century and buried on her land, Myra is convinced she is being haunted by the woman's spirit.

These fears take on a horrible new significance when her peaceful town is rocked by a series of shocking and unnatural deaths. All the victims have one thing in common: At one time or another they've offended Myra Ludens.

Bari Wood exposes the unease beneath the placed surface of a privileged life, the foreboding that can be inspired by a simple country lane, and the commonplace infected with skin-prickling dread. This is the setting for the appalling struggle at the core of this tale, wherein benevolence and malice vie for the possession of a good woman's soul.

From Publishers Weekly

Wood (Doll's Eyes) gives us more reasons to not go down into the basement in this chilling but painfully old-fashioned horror novel. Superwealthy New Englander Myra Ludens knows that her cellar instills a sense of foreboding in nearly everyone who enters it. What she doesn't know is that the contractor who's just redone it found the bones of one Elizabeth "Goody" Redman, who was hanged in 1695 for witchcraft and buried in unhallowed ground under the basement flooring. After Myra has a horrible vision in which these relics animate themselves and go after her, she asks Arlen Pinchot, one of her circle of eight wealthy friends who have been inseparable since kindergarten, for a book on raising and denouncing evil presences (Arlen's father was an aficionado of the occult). The ensuing exorcism seems to work, but then disaster strikes a number of people whom Myra doesn't like. Her cantankerous neighbor is stung to death by bees; the abusive husband of one of her friends is attacked by ticks, to fatal effect. Help in sorting out the mayhem arrives from Manhattan alchemist Job Landau and, especially, from Myra's psychiatrist friend Reed Lerner-but there's apparently nothing they can do to prevent a conclusion that's as confusing and unsatisfying as it is gory. Wood's fast pacing and ability to write a spooky scene will engage most readers, at least until the climax, but, except for the excessive bloodshed, there's little here-including a coy reference to the horrorscape of H.P. Lovecraft-that wasn't a staple of horror fiction 20 years ago.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

✦ Subjects

Connecticut