John Saul, Black Creek Crossing

Black Creek Crossing

John Saul

Ballantine, March 2004, $25.95, 368 pp.

ISBN 0345433327

Fifteen year old Angel Sullivan has no friends and is tormented by her peers. Her father drinks too much and has been fired from so many construction jobs there is nobody in town who will hire him. Marty's wife Myra loses herself in religion as a way of coping with her unhappy home life. When her sister Joni calls and informs her there is a perfect home that they can afford in Roundtree, Massachusetts, they buy it because Myra's brother-in-law gives Marty a job.

Angel loves her new home on Black Creek Crossing and believes she will make new friends at school but instead the students start tormenting her. The only person who befriends her is Seth Baker a pariah like Angel. Both teens notice inexplicable happenings in the house and a black cat with a definite agenda. He leads them to a place on the basement stairs where a book is found in a hidden panel and then he makes them follow him to a camouflaged cabin in the woods. There they open the book and what they find between the pages allows them to finally get revenge on their enemies.

Drawing on the Salem Witch trials and the folklore on haunted houses, John Saul creates a tale so vividly chilling and horrifying that readers will want to sleep with the lights on. BLACK CREEK CROSSING is not the typical haunted house story nor is it a modern day retailing of the Salem witches but an amalgam of the two. The protagonists draw reader sympathy from the very beginning which is why the ending is such a shock. Mr. Saul has written another gothic horror novel that is unforgettable.

Harriet Klausner