a twisted black tooth along a gleaming white smile” (p.280). among the rest of the modern glass condominiums on the block. But Audrey's personal demon war is just the appetizer, because the pièce de résistance is always The Breviary so much so that there's even a whiff of the idea that it represents those old-money, die-hard stringpullers of conservative America that defy change and progress like “gargoyles. And she's got such a horrific past that she should go batshit in her own devising. This is a novel about a girl going fucking bonkers, after all.

Like somebody broke you, and you keep trying to put yourself back together, only you do it wrong” (p.137). And all grounding certainly falls away when your title character is not only OCD, but, as a sympatric co-worker puts it, “You're pretty weird. Sensory perceptions become suspect as the surroundings change from naturally defined to invariably hostile, intimidating, untrustworthy. There's only enough of it there to hold the reader down so emotional responses and/or defenses can shred what's left of their rational mind.

That's because Horror is never about logic. Sarah's page for video trailer (a must!) Characters' choices are rarely judicious in Horror. The rich and influential zealots who inhabited lived not only in defiance of gravity, but, as time proved by murders, suicides, and unspeakable depravities, their sanity as well. But instead they “broke apart these natural patterns into a disjointed mishmash, as if to prove that not even God held providence over man. Extended to buildings, the structures tried to model nature - not Euclidian geometry - by shunning right angles, linear progressions and embracing spirals and vine-like growths. Built in 1861 by an iniquitous architectural visionary, it is the last remaining example of Chaotic Naturalism, a quasi-philosophy turned cultus that imagined the world broken away from following any logical pattern recognition. The Breviary would be an irresistible lure to any passionate architect, and Audrey, being a newly-degreed neophyte to a prestigious Manhattan firm, cannot resist the astonishingly-low cost vacancy caused by a recent act of filicide. Langan acknowledges her guides through the cobwebs of these stories(1), then launches a unique and fascinating re-imagining of the lynchpin for this sub-genre in her depiction of a once luxurious apartment building in New York City.

The aspiration here is not to be a trendy, psychological thriller-although it is that-but a genuine, old-fashioned haunted house yarn.

Audrey's Door by Sarah Langan