A-Z Wednesday: Burnt Offerings

A-Z Wednesday is yet another little book meme that I will be participating in in an effort to get me to think more about this blog. A-Z Wednesday is hosted by Reading at the Beach.

Here are the rules:
Go to your stack of books and find one whose title starts with the Letter of the Week.
Post:

1. A Photo of the Book
2. Title and Synopsis
3. A link (Amazon, B&N, etc.)
4. Come back here and leave your link in the comments

If you’ve already reviewed this book, post a link to the review as well. Be sure to visit other participants to see what books they have posted and leave them a comment (we all love comments, don’t we?) Who know? You may find your next “favorite” book.

THIS WEEK’S LETTER IS: B

My “B” Book is:

Burnt Offerings
by Robert Marasco
(New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1973)
Paperback, 319 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: 9780340189894, US$1.50

From the Cover: The Rolfes—Ben, wife Marian, son David, and Aunt Elizabeth—are a pleasant family from New York seeking to escape from the doldrums of a summer in their Queens apartment. They find a beautiful old country mansion on Long Island—restful, secluded, with pool and private beach—perfect, for the right people. But their "perfect" summer home hides terrors beyond their wildest imaginings. During that long summer the house becomes a nightmare from which there seems to be no escape.

My Thoughts: Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings is a novel that I came across a couple of years ago and when I finally got around the reading it, it blew my mind away. I immediately reviewed it … back when I was doing my Book Reviews via email to my friends and family and clogging their inboxes with big mega-emails. I originally reviewed this book in May of 2005 and this is what I had to say about it:

For all those folks who have at times felt that their home and possessions owned them, rather than the other way around; for those folks who love a good haunted house/possession tale; and even for those readers who simply enjoy a well-told thriller of a page-turner, Robert Marasco’s 1973 novel Burnt Offerings will be a real find. This was Marasco’s first novel in a sadly unprolific career; he came out with only two more titles – Child’s Play, a drama, in 1970, and Parlor Games, a Gothic-style mystery, in 1979 – before succumbing to lung cancer in 1998, at the age of 62. A real loss, if Burnt Offerings is any indication of the man’s skills. In this work, we meet Ben and Marian Rolfe, a nice, ordinary couple from Queens, who, with 8-year-old son David and elderly Aunt Elizabeth in tow, rent an aging mansion on Long Island’s North Fork. This property is let for the unbelievably low price of $900 for the entire summer, with one proviso: the renters’ mother will remain in her room for the duration, but will stay out of sight and be quite low maintenance. Marasco then begins to gently turn the screws, and before long, horrible things start to transpire, or do they? Marian becomes obsessed with keeping house, while her hair quickly grays; Ben starts to physically abuse his son uncontrollably and to suffer morbid hallucinations; and Elizabeth, once spry, starts to age at an alarming rate. And that is just the start of this amazing story. Marasco writes extremely well; it is hard for me to believe that this was his first novel. Yes, he is sometimes guilty of the faults of a beginning writer, such as an occasional bit of fuzzy writing and some instances of poor grammar and punctuation (granted, those latter are more the fault of Marasco’s editor). But what he excels at is beautifully rendered, realistic dialogue; I’ve seldom read better. Perhaps I should also mention here that this book was chosen by no less a luminary than Stephen King for inclusion in Stephen Jones and Kim Newman’s excellent overview volume Horror: 100 Best Books (which is where I first heard of the book). It is easy to see the influence that Burnt Offerings had on King’s similarly themed The Shining, which came out four years later. Although perhaps not as chilling as King’s novel, or Shirley Jackson’s classic The Haunting of Hill House (but then again, how many books are?), Burnt Offerings can even hold its own in that august company. The folks in Richard Matheson’s Hell House go through no greater horrors than the Rolfes do, either. The Rolfes are a sweet couple, and the reader roots for them, and hopes that they come through their ordeals okay. But with the creeping, living forces of the Allardyce mansion ranged against them, the odds are certainly not in their favor! Anyway, let me just say that I more than highly recommend this book to any and all interested readers.

I think that that pretty much says it all, without rereading the book especially for this A-Z Wednesday offering, and I really can’t recommend this book highly enough … it is, as I said in the 2005 review, a truly chilling book and one which I will probably be rereading in the near future, because now I am excited about the book all over again. As someone who is making a academic-literary career of studying and writing about Contemporary American Literature and Gothic American Literature, Burnt Offerings is of particular interest to me, especially as it is in relation to the American Gothic tradition of the “Bad Place” such as the Bates Motel in Robert Bloch’s Psycho the Marsten House in Stephen King’s ‘salem’s Lot, the Overlook Hotel in King’s The Shining, Hill House in Shirley Jackson’s eponymous novel, I could go on. There is something very interesting in the American Gothic tradition to write about the “Bad Place” and how this parallels similar movements in the British Gothic tradition in Victorian England, as well as paralleling ideas of manhood and gender roles and evolving sexuality in a changing world.

Well, that’s probably more than anyone wanted to know about Burnt Offerings, but there you go. I’m a budding academic. I can’t help it. Until next time…