Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco
The opportunity to rent a mansion in upstate New York for the full season for just $900 is too tempting to pass up for Ben and Marian Rolfe, who are yearning to escape an oppressive summer in their cramped Brooklyn apartment. The only catch is that the elderly Mrs. Allardyce lives behind a weird and artistically carved door in a different part of the home, and the Rolfes will be in charge of cooking her meals.
However, Mrs. Allardyce never seems to leave her room, and it soon becomes apparent that a strange and horrific event is taking place in the home.
The Rolfes will learn that their inexpensive vacation home comes at a horrible cost as the tension intensifies towards the discovery of what really lies behind that locked door…
Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco
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Another illustration of a haunted house with shifting residents can be found in Burnt Offerings. In order to benefit itself, it manipulates their behavior.
For the summer, Marion and Ben rent a sizable country house, but there’s a catch. Marion will be responsible for caring for the property’s old mother, who was left behind by the property’s elderly brother and sister. When they get to the house, Marion brings the mother a lunch tray because she doesn’t answer the door. For the most of the book, the mother looms as an ominous presence. Why is she silent? What keeps her inside her room? Why does Marion stand by the elderly woman’s door more frequently now? Exists the elderly person at all?
The degree to which Marion’s obsession with the house grows scares me a lot. Terrible things happen, and Marion just grows more devoted to the house as things go worse and her family is in serious danger.
Burnt Offerings is a good horror book in and of itself, not just because of what it influenced. Burnt Offerings, the tale of a family who moves into a summer home that seems too good to be true, is the ideal illustration of a slow burn, with each chapter revealing characters acting ever-so-slightly oddly, obsessively, or off, and the household feeling ever-so-slightly abnormal. By the time the book’s final handful of chapters really pick up speed, you realize how masterfully Marasco has been laying the scene for everything, building tension gradually and allowing us to see the characters’ best-case scenarios play out.
