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The Birthing House
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Product Description
It was expecting them.
Conrad and Joanna Harrison, a young couple from Los Angeles, attempt to save their marriage by leaving the pressures of the city to start anew in a quiet, rural setting. They buy a Victorian mansion that once served as a haven for unwed mothers, called a birthing house. One day when Joanna is away, the previous owner visits Conrad to bequeath a vital piece of the house’s historic heritage, a photo album that he claims “belongs to the house.” Thumbing through the old, sepia-colored photographs of midwives and fearful, unhappily pregnant girls in their starched, nineteenth-century dresses, Conrad is suddenly chilled to the bone: staring back at him with a countenance of hatred and rage is the image of his own wife….
Thus begins a story of possession, sexual obsession, and, ultimately, murder, as a centuries-old crime is reenacted in the present, turning Conrad and Joanna’s American dream into a relentless nightmare.
An extraordinary marriage of supernatural thrills and exquisite psychological suspense, The Birthing House marks the debut of a writer whose first novel is a terrifying tour de force.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #101439 in Books
- Published on: 2009-08-04
- Released on: 2009-08-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 320 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780312385842
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
A blend of supernatural horror and psychological thriller, Ransom's impressive debut chronicles a couple's descent into madness after they purchase a 140-year-old Victorian house in rural Wisconsin. Failed L.A. screenwriter Conrad Harrison, whose marriage is on the rocks and who's still coming to grips with the sudden death of his estranged father, decides it's time for a change and, on a whim, buys a turn-of-the-century birthing house he fatefully found after driving the wrong way out of Chicago. But the sprawling structure has a dark history, and after his wife lands a new job and leaves for a few weeks of training in Detroit, Harrison begins to unravel the house's bloody past, even as his own sanity is unraveling. Replete with subtle symbolism that supports the birthing motif (spiders with bulging egg sacs, a moist clutch of snake eggs, etc.), this addictively readable ghost story will keep readers up all night, with the lights on, of course. (Aug.)
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From Booklist
Conrad Harrison takes a wrong turn out of Chicago and winds up buying an old Victorian house in a small Wisconsin town—just the thing for getting out of L.A., which Conrad hates because of his low-bucks fumbling and dependence on his high-bucks-salesperson wife. But they are no sooner relocated than Joanna flees to an eight-week training for a new job. While she is away, the neighbors befriend Conrad and ask him to keep an eye on their pregnant daughter (the boyfriend’s a flake) while they’re off recharging their marriage. Ad hoc guardianship first seems a good reason to get out of the house, which is getting to Conrad. He keeps hearing a newborn crying, glimpsing a dark figure, and after he sees Joanna in a photo album that goes with the house, he is seriously freaked, also occasionally unable to account for long periods of time. The house is haunted, of course, and Conrad’s is just the kind of frustrated consciousness most susceptible to occupation by the spirit it contains. A lot of sex and climactic gore and a well-sustained ambiguity about how much a malevolent ghost and how much a progressively insane Conrad is to blame are balanced against weaknesses in characterization and choppy narrative flow, but this is a good-enough first horror outing. In any event, it’s getting a big first printing and publicity to match. --Ray Olson
Review
Advance Praise for The Birthing House
“A blend of supernatural horror and psychological thriller, Ransom’s impressive debut chronicles a couple’s descent into madness after they purchase a 140-year-old Victorian house in rural Wisconsin . . . this addictively readable ghost story will keep readers up all night, with the lights on, of course.” —Publishers Weekly
“Adjustable-rate mortgages are frightening indeed, but what about the underlying property? This debut novel by Christopher Ransom gives a new spin to the venerable haunted-house story. . . . Ransom has a distinctive narrative voice, and a Stephen King-like gift for the dreadful lurking behind the everyday. . . . The novel builds to a gripping climax that will make you think twice, maybe three times, about making an offer on that beautiful old fixer-upper.”—SmartMoney magazine
“A biting and well-written novel… The kind of genuinely scary story that makes little hairs stand up on the back of your neck… This is a rare thing: a ghost story with class. Read it.”—Peter Blauner, author of the New York Times bestseller Slipping Into Darkness
“The birth of an exciting new voice in dark fiction… The Birthing House is a book that will leave you holding your breath.”—Scott Nicholson, Bram Stoker Award finalist, author of They Hunger
“Either I don’t know my horror stories (and I do know my horror stories) or Christopher Ransom’s The Birthing House was so all-out scary that it kept me up until the wee hours in a way few novels have since Carrie went to the prom…. This book is killer.” —Jacquelyn Mitchard, New York Times bestselling author of The Deep End of the Ocean
“The Birthing House is as scary as they come…. It’s quite simply a terrific novel.” —Marcus Sakey, author of The Blade Itself
“Terrifying and beautiful. I couldn’t put The Birthing House down.” —Sara Gran, author of Dope
“A damn creepy, very original ghost story.” —Jack Ketchum, Bram Stoker Award winner, author of The Lost
“A stunning debut—swaddling the reader in dread from the very first sentence, and spiraling into a heart-stopping climax.”—Michael Marshall, New York Times bestselling author of The Straw Men
“Christopher Ransom’s debut is so disturbing at times that it will truly terrify readers, quite an accomplishment for a debut, in my opinion. (The Birthing House brings to mind very early John Saul.) Ransom shows great promise in the horror genre.”—BookBitch.com
Customer Reviews
Wow. What A Disappointment.
The only reason I'm giving this book one star is that despite the wheels falling off the cart in the second half of the book, I think Ransom has great potential as a writer. It starts with a great premise: A young couple having marital problems moves from the sprawl of Los Angeles to a remote home in Wisconsin, that holds it's own dark and twisted secrets. The books rests somewhere between 'The Amityville Horror' and 'The Shining' , but never really reaches either in terms of a horror benchmark. I wanted to get scared, was waiting to get scared, but never really was. To me, this is a tepid ghost story with some graphic sex, and a ridiculous final thirty pages that will have you wondering not only what just happened, by why you even bothered.
Mysterious and Chilling
THE BIRTHING HOUSE is one of the more original and solidly crafted horror novels I've read in years. Although it does rely on tried and true haunted house tropes to construct its plot, it is still in a class by itself when it comes to the genre. The "tried and true" include main characters who are escaping to what they believe will be a more tranquil, less disturbed life (when the opposite is true) and the fact that the spirits in the haunted house are restless over a long ago injustice and cannot rest until they make their voices heard. But author Ransom takes these tropes and injects them with a modern sensibility to bring us true dread and terror not so much from ghosts and things that go bump in the night (although there is plenty of that), but from the demons that lurk deep within our own psyches, which can ultimately be the real horror. Good horror novels are hard to come by, good haunted house tales even harder. THE BIRTHING HOUSE has been expecting you, especially if you, like me, have long hungered for a tale that stylishly inspires genuine creeps.
Weird, Dark and Disconnected Ghost Story
Sometimes weird is good. I really hoped for a good, weird supernatural story in the vein of Stephen King's Duma Key: A Novel, Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas or the movies The Others (Two-Disc Collector's Edition) or What Lies Beneath in this one.
This story IS bizarre, but I just didn't find it all that good (and really had little interest in reading the end).
SUMMARY: A man impulsively buys a historic house in Wisconsin, and relocates his strained relationship with his wife there from Los Angeles. Immediately bizarre things begin to happen. Is he crazy or is it haunted? Or both? Or neither?
Upsides:
- The premise is good and certainly intriguing during the first half.
- The author is actually a pretty good writer with the ability to create scary tension on occassion, and there's hope that since this is his debut novel his plotting and characterizations will get better.
Downsides:
- None of the characters are sympathetic, and I found most of the choices the characters make unbelievable and not well explained.
- Another reviewer said there was little sex in this book. But, the entire theme and action is driven around sex and getting pregnant (thus, the name). That's not bad. But, the way it's told - it seems kind of slimy weird.
- The story is disjointed. Can't decide if that's the writing or the editing. Somehow the dots never really connect as the story moves along, and even when it's explained towards the end (in an odd fashion), I was left with this feeling of "Huh??, Okay. Next".
Bottom Line: For only the most devout fans of haunted house stories - and even some of them may find this is not quite up to their expectations.
