Hi there today on Typical Books. I'd like to talk about Haunted by James Herbert. It is a typical book in that it's about all the things I like. It's about seances and mediums and ghosts and haunted houses, unreliable narrators, unreliable everythings. I really enjoyed this but first I want to get into a little bit of my editorial decision and my catch up of the Horror in 24 readathon. I am at the beginning of reading Rebecca and I'm enjoying it immensely and I am tempted to slow right down and take this in. It's a fairly meaty read. It looks like a typically sized book but the text of it is very small. So what I want to do is just sort of slow down and take this in. I've taken the dust jacket off because that's what I prefer to do so it's not slipping around. I didn't mind it so much with Haunted. It was a more lightweight book because it's probably older and it's lost a lot of its moisture. I don't think this printing is as old so it's still very heavy high plate content book or something like that so it's very heavy and yeah I didn't want to damage the slip cover so I'm taking it off. But Rebecca is wonderful and it does satisfy a few of the tips. It is a psychological horror. It is a gothic and it is something that's been on my TBR for a long time. Now you may think Lydia that's too many books to cram into one and I'm waiting for the readathon where I can get all of the requirements in one book right? Ha ha. But I don't really mind because I've made another executive decision. As much as I'm enjoying Shadows and Tall Trees 8 from Undertow Press I have decided for red on the cover I'm going to read Jack Ketchum's red and I'm very excited. I don't I believe that there's a novella in here as well so it's two stories the passenger and red and um so it's a little bit shorter that's fine. It'll be a little lighter and I think it'll be a little more summery although I do kind of want to get into there's one or two readathons going on right now and there's the different kind of summer horror style readathon that John had done at Books of Blood and I've seen some of the spooky um spooky bees what people are saying spooky bitches um smart horror readathon or something like that that's intriguing to me so I'm so tempted to do another readathon but yeah I am also very tempted to read red for red on the cover how can I not right so those are my editorial decisions so far one thing I really enjoyed about reading haunted was that it ties into Rebecca and it ties into the other horror and 24 story the host that was not there that I'm reading as I'm reading this in The Vampires and the Werewolves short story collections by Bernard J. Hurwood that came up from Scholastic way back in the day um yeah so I love how these things all tie together and maybe I'll get into that a little more in horror and 24 wrap up or if I do a separate Rebecca review so for now haunted haunted by James Herbert it's not my first James Herbert and it won't be my last there's other rats version stories that go along with the rats and a nest I believe and there's uh oh I can't remember the titles of them but there's other uh ash books as well David Ash is one of the main characters in this the main character the male lead so to speak in this now haunted did garner 111 out of 114 in the book score that's provided by mers at harpy's in the trees thank you again for that always thank you for that and where it lost points is something that you would go into this book sort of expecting perhaps because it's a mediums and psychics in a haunted house without any of the decadence of something like hell house it's a little lighter fair than that a little less extreme of course it's a more gentle maybe a quiet horror it's sort of somewhere in between there but there are some characters that are just too stereotypical so I had to give it a little bit of a dang it couldn't get perfect right it just could not get perfect it is close to perfect it really is especially for me and that's the beauty of the book score is it does take into account and you can tweak it and mold it a little bit where you know I don't find some some verse of really subversive or extreme or boring writing is a is a minus I find that a plus so you can change that sort of stuff depending on your reading style as to how you would and make this scoring a little more personal than just the plain five stars so this does get five stars but it's not a perfect five stars there's a few things about haunted that I absolutely loved and it wasn't just the characters and the characters interaction the dialogue is so natural and it seems James Herbert's very very good at doing that I really enjoyed that they were all very distinct there was different sort of tropes as far as the the family goes there was the surly brother the younger fun loving brother that doesn't take anything seriously the sister who is a bit of a a love interest or not a sex pot necessarily but the prudish horsey set and a luring type there was a crazy sister there is the who could be a mrs danvers there is anti tass the house mistress so to speak that is their hand and all those characters intertwined on one hand I don't want to dock them too much for being stereotypical because that is what they do in this story but a few of the things they did and said were just a little too uh paint by numbers where they could have been given a little a little extra edge now I think that in reading Rebecca a lot of what the main character there is seeing in um mr de winter is what they she would have found a lot more of it in david ash he is a wonderful skeptical medium and I love this so I'm very interested in seeing more of this particular character and how he evolves we have some insight into him having a horrible event happen in his childhood that coupled with his budding telemetry or his I don't know if it's necessarily telemetric or if he's just a medium or if he's a mind reading psychic I'm not really exactly sure where he fits in because he seems to fit into a few things there because he does have what I think is telemetry by touching objects being able to see some of the past and the psyches of other people that have touched them he seems to exhibit some of that and straight up mind reading he does profess to have but he really keeps it all in a tight little box because he is a skeptic he is one of my favorite ghost hunters the type who wants to disprove things with science so it was really up my alley the story begins outside of a little town called raven more on the way to adbrock which is this mansion owned by the web family and just those terms alone raven more the web family I was in love with this let alone someone named david ash which was so close to daniel ash and I couldn't help but have baha's kind of vibes from this and they definitely panned out because he is a little bit of a moody man and I really liked watching his journey and learning about the history of this mansion the history of the web family the history of ash and the psychometric institute that he works for it's an institute of psychical studies if I recall and I remember being a kid and my grandmother receiving a letter contacted by some sort of similar psychical institute from the UK that were contacting a lot of like wise women in the area and psychics and things like that to see if they would be game to be tested with whatever sort of research that they were doing on mediumship and psychometry and things like that so I was very intrigued with this institute and it's not quite you know talamasca levels of secret society they are more like a skeptical institute and I enjoy the reality of institutes like that like move on so suffice it to say if you enjoy stories of haunted houses ghosts and strange family occurrences people that have budding psychic gifts that are keeping it under wraps or other people that show off those talents and can call out other mediums if you enjoyed watching that john edwards show and tv way back in the day then definitely pick up something like this I am interested in reading the rest of the stories although I do have a few other books on my toppling tbr pile that's for sure so someday I will definitely dig into some of the david ash series from James Herbert because I really enjoy his writing style it's very digestible it was a very quick read and just a beautiful read because it's edited wonderfully and the language is wonderful the dialogue is natural the settings are bleak but comfortable I don't know how else to describe it except it's just exactly where I want to be david ash a psychic investigator is invited to edbrook a remote country house where an alleged haunting is taking place there he meets the meryl family two brothers robert and simon and their younger sister christina and their aunt nanny tess ash is renowned for his dismissal of all things supernatural having exposed many fake mediums in the past as well as invariably finding natural causes for so-called psychic phenomena he has a deep psychological reason for refuting such unearthly occurrences but at edbrook there is a mystery which cannot easily be explained over three hideous nights of terror david ash is forced not only to reevaluate his beliefs but also to confront the enigma of his own past there are games to be played at this place nightmarish pastimes of a deadly and maleficent nature and only when they are done will edbrook's dreadful secret be disclosed so thank you very much for checking out another episode of typical books coming up next i want to do of course a wrap-up on horror in 24 but before then i'm likely going to do a little bit of a talk of some of the novellas that i've read lately and those have been sort of a stopgap between a lot of the books i've been reading i'll pick up either a short story or a novella right now and the lengths of them about eight thousand nine thousand words are really digestible but it's hard for me to reconcile doing a review and maybe i'll get better at just doing a review of a short story or novella but for now i'm gonna kind of lump them together into one and do a couple of these pieces so let me know what you've been reading if there's anything here that you've read before out of rebecca haunted or the house that wasn't there that old short story or old english folktales that are very similar then definitely let me know in the comments below or just what you're reading right now thank you ever so much for watching and subscribing and make sure that you have an oaky spooky day