Customer Reviews

House Of Bones

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This book was frightening. There are very, very few books I'd give that adjective to, and many belong to Mr. King himself.

The plot is essentially the same as The House on Haunted Hill. A group of strangers are asked to spend a specific amount of time within a supposedly haunted building, only to learn that they have some connection webbing between them all.

It's not the most original plot in the world, but even Shakespeare was known to recycle from those before him.

Ok, I've already referenced King and Shakespeare here. This book is not in a league with them (nor are they in a league with each other). It's a solid effort, though. There are some groaning points, and moments when you just keep asking why the character is being so stupid, but it's made clear that many of these characters are not of sound mind and not of the best judgment.

What really makes this book, though, are the following:
Setting. Run-down projects with a long history of violence.

Characters. They're diverse with clearly different personalities.
Writing. This book is dense. The paragraphs are long and thick but not cluttered. You're getting a great deal of words for your dollar, as no page is wasted. The result is a clear understanding of the characters and some great, flowing narrative and descriptions.

I suppose the last point could be a sore one for many. My girlfriend started this novel and found it bulky, never finishing it. To me, though, it just made the book richer and livelier. Horror books tend to vary between pages of redundant, gory action narrative and pages of simple, one-sentence dialogue. This book tries to read more like a novel and less like a movie script, and it pays off.

Be aware of some flaws in this book, but it will still shine as you read it. Give it a chance if you want a horror book with moderately more meat than the rest of the market.

A book with and smooth beganning but lack any real substance. It takes for every to get the book going and when it does you push yourself to end. There is no real thrill or chills just emptyness. I left wanting more...

Dreamland was abandoned years ago and has been semi-demolished before its demise is halted by a rich man with an agenda for investigating its legendary history of violence. Accompanied by an unlikely crew of strangers hired to join him, he soon discovers Dreamland's supernatural links refuse to be probed, and that his search has brought the supernatural monster to deadly new life. House of Bones is a gripping story of suspense.

I saw a review that implies that this novel reaches the status of literature. If by that they mean this book is dull, slow and overdone maybe. This was a poor book. The author tries to establish character but none of them seem real, despite the effort the characters are very 2 dimensional.
The author clearly has some strong views on race, and at first that seemed like it may be interesting in this type of novel, the problem is that he tries to hard to hammer home his view on this topic. Apparently this author feels all white men are insensitive biggots, and the only sympathetic character to the blight of the poor black men and women is a woman.
I could of gotten past the politics that I disagree with if the book had at all been interesting or original, which it was not.
I was also not a fan of the writing style of this author, it seemed like every once in awhile he would throw in a big word to seem intelligent, but it felt odd and out of place.

I recommend not to waste your time, try Michael Connoly's The Poet. That is a very good book.

Dale Bailey, House of Bones (Signet, 2003)

Ladies and Gentlemen, let me make this clear from the outset: Dale Bailey is the real deal. This is good, solid haunted house horror that will keep you up late at night turning pages.

The mark of an author who knows what he's doing is the ability to draw you in without you knowing exactly where you got drawn in. King does it well, when he doesn't grab you with the first sentence. Carson McCullers was a master at it. Bailey is the heir apparent. I'm not sure where it happened, but somewhere between pages 25 and 65, I found myself wanting to not eat, not sleep, and not do much of anything else until I had finished this book. (I ended up doing so less than forty-eight hours after that. It would have been less if not for a crisis at work.)

Dreamland is your basic housing project. Except for Building Three, where a whole lot of bad things have happened over the years. Dreamland is slated for demolition, but an eccentric billionaire named Ramsey Lomax has bribed the city to halt the demolition of Building Three and allow him to move into it for two weeks. He contacts a number of seemingly diverse people to spend the time with him, investigating the presence of ghostly activity. Four respond: a journalist who spent the first tree years of his life there, a discredited medium, a veteran with a shady past, and a young doctor on the verge of losing her career. The five lock themselves (with the aid of a convenient blizzard) in Dreamland, and the fun begins.

Put together the words "Chicago" and "projects" and the first thing likely to come to any horror or true crime fan's mind is Cabrini Green. Bailey pulls a nice sleight-of-hand, recognizable only to those of who who've seen it before, to differentiate the two, but there are still obvious comparisons. (Some of the events leading to the ghostly activity have shades of real-life crimes committed at Cabrini Green, as well; readers of the works of Peter Sotos will recognize a few of the things Ramsey Lomax points out as he guides his compatriots on their first tour of Dreamland.) There are a few minor loose threads involved with this angle of things (an aerial photo of Dreamland is referred to as looking like Stonehenge, which Bailey draws attention to, and then it's never mentioned again, for example), but nothing that can't be explained away as a red herring.

Where Bailey's writing suffers, and let me rush to say I use the term "suffers" when benchmarking this stuff against classic haunted house literature that makes everyone and their mother's 100-best lists, is that his characterization is developed a bit on the, well, leisurely side. In other words, by the end of the book, you have three-dimensional characters, but in some cases you have to wait till the end of the book to get there. I understand this is a device for hooking the reader, but (a) it's overused and trite, and (b) Bailey's already got more hooks than the slaughterhouse in the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As passe as it may be, this is one place where Bailey could take a few new tricks from the old dog himself, Stephen King (who was, is, and always will be a master of characterization in a few concise lines).

That aside, I cannot say enough good things about Dale Bailey. Read this. You will not regret it. If you download it free online or get it out of the library, I'll even offer a money-back guarantee. ****

Wow. I was just blown away by this book. This is the story of a place that is just plain bad. Dreamland was a housing development that turned into an urban war zone. Now the city has razed the buildings- all except the third tower, which just happens to be the one with the bloodiest history. Demolition of tower three was halted by a very wealthy man who wants to find out if the rumors about the tower being haunted are true. He brings four people with big problems of their own and ties to the tower along with him, hoping to get to the truth for reasons of his own.

I was truly impressed with this book. I will definitely read more of Bailey's books.

Dale Bailey has crafted a novel that is as multileveled in its subtext as is Dreamland, the high-rise urban Hell known as THE HOUSE OF BONES. Bailey creates characters that are frightening in their similarities to those around us; they think bad thoughts, are selfish, and are fraught with self-doubt. They move through the novel as we do in real life, toward a nasty end that is one-sided and ugly in its eventuality. Reading HOUSE OF BONES, one knows that life will not end well for its characters as Bailey instills an ever-growing dread and suspense within each page. It's like watching a movie like SE7EN--you know somebody's going to get it, you don't know when, and worse, you never know HOW. It is a page-turner. This novel is an improvement over the excellent FALLEN and his style sings. His is a fresh and literate voice amongst a plethora of writers who would recycle the same novel repeatedly changing only the character's names and little else. It is refreshing to find a writer unafraid to go in a divergent direction and craft work that is not only different in style and voice but in subject matter. Moreover, this book contains important social connotation and could very easily be a mainstream literary novel in the vein of BELOVED. I will not give away plot points of this book as to do so would rob the reader of its majesty and suspense. Don't look at the blurb on the back of the book either if you truly want to be enthralled with and taken over by Dreamland, THE HOUSE OF BONES.

Wow,does this book suck or what? I found it to be extremely mundane, prosaic, intellectually meager, irritating instead of frightening or intriguing. Save your money. How these kinds of crappy stories get published, I will forever wonder.

Novels about ghosts and hauntings are hard to pull off mainly for the reason that the ghost tale itself has been around for so long that every possible variation on the theme has been done. Dale Bailey's "The House of Bones" balances traditional techniques with the twist of modern social commentary. As in all classic haunted habitat novels and movies (Richard Matheson's "Hell House," Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House," the film "The House on Haunted Hill," for example), the device of an eccentric bringing together a disparate group of strangers, each with a secret, is used. The setting, however, is not the traditional manor, but an abandoned housing project, a place haunted by overwhelming despair that has lived on beyond the physical tenants.
The writing is quite exceptional, the characters all well-rounded and the allegorical use of poverty and racism works very well. First and foremost, however, the novel is also often very terrifying and that is, after all, the true test of a great ghost story.
I think the publisher made a mistake not putting this out in hardcover. It would be a shame if the ephemeral nature of paperback originals causes this one to be overlooked and forgotten. I truly believe it's one of the best ghost stories of recent times, up there with the aforementioned "Hell House" and "The Haunting of Hill House."

Also recommended: "Deep in the Darkness" by Michael Laimo, "The Hour Before Dark" by Douglas Clegg, and "Darkness Demands" by Simon Clark.

There's no doubt that Dale Bailey knows how to use the English language...perhaps too well. The book seems long, long, long....so much of it is spent on teasing the reader with the dark secrets our characters hold. But he overdoes it, even using redundant passages to keep us hooked, without any real payoff. By the time the book reaches a point where something is really going on, you've had to test your own endurance levels to get there. At what point does a reader have to admire a writer's command of language enough to forget you're yawning more than feeling the chills he obviously wants us to? The characters are well drawn, but I found his choice of who to use for the final villain a little disconcerting. Oh, well, variety is the spice of life. I just didn't enjoy this book.