From Publishers Weekly
With more than 30 books under his belt, veteran suspense novelist Saul is back with a horror novel featuring witchcraft, teen revenge and a haunted house. Angel Sullivan, a plain-looking 14-year-old who never fits in, gets a chance for a fresh start when her family moves into the plush community of Roundtree. Myra, her obsessively religious mother, and Marty, her lazy, alcoholic father, buy a house on Black Creek Crossing, even though the place is rumored to be haunted. Soon after they settle in, a black cat mysteriously appears out of thin air, smoke from a nonexistent fire fills the house and a girl's face appears in the darkness, reflected in a mirror. Meanwhile, Angel, wi?h the help of another school outcast, Seth Baker, begins to investigate the history of the house. They discover an ancient book of spells that may have belonged to the house's original owners, members of a Salem-like community of witches, and the teens proceed to cast spells on the bullies who torment them. But the sinister forces inhabiting the house are just biding their time until they turn their malice on Angel and Seth. Saul crafts a few passable scenes—the potions Angel and Seth concoct work in clever ways—but the chills are few and far between in this lackluster, paint-by-the-numbers horror tale.
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The seventeenth-century house at Black Creek Crossing in Roundtree (Massachusetts?) is a hard sell. Since the original owner's wife and daughter were burned for witchcraft, it has seldom been occupied long, and those who occupy it usually die in it, mysteriously and violently. Myra Sullivan doesn't know all that when her realtor sister shows her the house, and when husband Marty and daughter Angel take a shine to it, she's sold because, after all, she and frequently out-of-work Marty can actually afford it. Angel is drawn to a west-facing bedroom, and no sooner does she settle in than she finds a black cat in the closet. How did it get in? And how, when it goes, does it leave utterly unobserved? Well, think about it, witchophiles. It's the doppelganger of the girl witch's spirit, and in short order it leads Angel and her new friend, Seth Baker, to a secluded cabin and a book of spells that, the two 13-year-olds discover, they can use to defeat their foes. They have more than their fair share of those, starting with abusive fathers and unhelpful mothers and including classmates who harass them, verbally and physically. Angel and Seth are two more of the immensely sympathetic and appealing teen protagonists that Saul excels at creating, but they are tampering with evil stuff, and unlike, say, similar characters in John Farris' or Dean Koontz's books, they don't escape punishment in this remarkably gratifying horror yarn.
Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
