Can Dena and her two young daughters survive a week in a house inhabited by warring ghosts?

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Product Description

Dena was recently divorced and ready for a new life in Benevolence. She had a new job and an old house. The job was promising. The house was perfect. It had plenty of space for her and her two daughters. It had a great yard. It was just what she needed. She really thought this week was going to be the start of something wonderful. The house had other ideas...

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2694860 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 120 pages

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Customer Reviews

Seven Days in Benevolence
Dena Harris is ready to start her life anew. Recently divorced, the mother of two daughters takes a secretarial job in the town of Benevolence. When she manages to rent a fabulous house in Benevolence within her price range, Dena is sure that her life is definitely changing for the better. Then Dena starts to hear the rumors about unexplained occurrences and mysterious deaths that had occurred at the Astor House, the house Dena and her daughters have just rented.

Seven Days in Benevolence is an exciting paranormal thriller. The story is action filled and progresses at a nice speed. The characters are very well developed. The children react to the rumors and the ongoing events as real children would likely do, scared of the dark, the closet, and the potential bogeyman. Furthermore, the main character Dena reacts to her children's fears as normal childhood fears comforting without overreacting and at times getting downright frustrated. She also looks for rational reasons for the events occurring in her house without jumping to the conclusion immediately that something weird is going on. These reactions make the characters more realistic with a great deal of depth

Seven Days in Benevolence by Steven Wedel
I've always enjoyed a good ghost or haunted house story. I wasn't disappointed with Seven Days in Benevolence. At about 120 pages, this short told over the course of seven days, really sucked me in at first. The main character Dena has just been through a divorce, for reasons that are brought up through some really great dialogue with her ex. So her and her two daughters have moved to Benevolence, Oklahoma for a new beginning.

Dena finds the perfect house, and for just the right price. She's positive that things are starting to look up. That's when things start going really wrong. Her oldest daughter Rebecca hears stories from the children at school, that the house is haunted by people who were killed in it. Dena continues to push aside the strange happenings in the house, saying they are just her imagination. Like doors not staying shut, weird ripples in the bath water, light bulbs burning out, and batteries dying after they've just been taken out of the package. Everything comes to a head when the ghosts start speaking to Dena and her family.

I was really creeped out by all the little things that were happening in the house. It probably didn't help that I have just moved into a new house as well.

I did have a couple problems with the ending. Dismembering a man's penis in order to defeat the ghost just didn't work for me. That man's penis being used as a weapon on a small child was even worse (no it didn't end up being used that way, thank goodness). Overall, it's a great story that builds up nicely, but has an okay ending.

A nineteen hundred pound bull in a novella sized china shop
"Seven Days in Benevolence" by Steven E. Wedel is everything that you would expect from a master storyteller with a few of style points deducted for disturbing content.

Just through a painful divorce, Dena and her two daughters are ready for a new life in Benevolence, Oklahoma. Even though Dena has a found job, moving to a new town poses challenges. The family needs a place to live. The oldest daughter, Rebecca, will attend public school, and the youngest, Brianna, needs day care. Her ex-husband still wants Dena and the children back, but can't have them for reasons that are brilliantly developed through context, action and dialogue.

When Dena finds an old house that's just the right size for the family and has the perfect yard and a basement, she doesn't realize how much more than a home she is getting. Like every really good ghost story, the setting is a character unto itself, and this one is very well drawn. The seven days the family spends in that setting are told in this novella length story. There was enough meat on the stiff old bones of the house on 12th Street to have made a novel that really measured up.

Have you ever been swept along by a story so much that your "willing suspension of disbelief" was so utterly suspended that, like a rodeo cowboy, you didn't realize that things were going wrong until you were bucked off and being stomped on by a very angry nineteen hundred pound bull? That is this story. There are two things about the story that bothered me enough to deduct a few style points. It's disturbing to read a story that emphasizes the forcible amputation of a human penis as a method of salvation. It's quite beyond that to have that penis intended to be used as a weapon against an infant with "her small body stripped of all clothing, her arms and legs splayed so that she looked like a pale, stranded starfish" (p.97). This was an unfortunate choice and compromised the ending of what had been a very good story up to then.