Julian's House - Hardcover

This suspenseful haunted-house tale--praised by the New York Times for its "passages rich with descriptive beauty, complex with philosophical theorizing and seductive with hard (and tantalizing) information"--is a rich elaboration on the premise of parapsychologists trying to document ghost behavior. In this instance the researchers are a recently married (and sexually repressed) young couple who move their high-tech equipment into a Victorian house with the requisite history of bumps in the night. They are prepared to encounter supernatural phenomena, but not at all prepared to examine their own psyches. When the house starts acting as a sounding board for their neurotic conflicts, it's not clear whether actual ghosts are acting as interactive mirrors, or if the house is simply a big Rorschach inkblot for the projections of a troubled marriage. Judith Hawkes unfolds all the chilling complexity of the puzzle, and leaves readers to draw their own conclusions.

Though descriptions of channeling may attract ardent New Agers, this haunted-house story, decked out with speculation about parapsychology and dragged to an ambiguous conclusion, is dull reading. The year-old marriage of psychic researchers David and Sally Curtiss is already shaky when they move into a house reputedly spooked by the Gilfoy family and a tramp. David and Sally plan field research and, when nothing happens, bring in Roseanna Paine, a medium, who raises evidence of ghosts as well as David's heretofore dormant libido. The spirits take over David and Sally, causing them to act out old Gilfoy passions--although another explanation could be that it is easier for David to perform sexually while pretending to be someone else. Other manifestations of ghostly presences--odd noises, moved objects, roaming dogs--are hokum. Whether all this is paranormal, or normal pathology mixed with coincidence, turns out to be irrelevant. The mystery of the author's three-handed jacket photo is the most interesting thing about the novel.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.