The House of Last Resort is Another Horror Page-Turner From Christopher Golden

Christopher Golden is a veteran of the horror story in many forms, a practiced hand who can always be counted on to deliver a spooky, satisfying tale at just about any length. He’s just a guy who gets it, as his recent novels like Road of Bones and All Hallows have proven. Now, Golden’s back with The House of Last Resort, a constantly evolving little chiller that’s yet another reminder that he’s one of the best in the game and a book you won’t be able to put down. 

The novel begins with the inherently scary and invigorating choice by one couple to take a big leap with their lives. Tommy and Kate have uprooted everything they know, left their home in Boston, and traveled halfway around the world to the small Sicilian village of Becchina, where Tommy’s grandparents live. There, in an effort to boost the local economy, the mayor has started a program that allows new residents to purchase houses for a single Euro, provided that they’re willing to make improvements and invest in the town along the way. For Tommy and Kate, it’s an opportunity they can’t pass up, particularly when they see the massive, beautifully shabby house they end up buying. 

But of course, something’s wrong in Becchina, and it’s not just the lagging economy and the way earthquakes seem to plague the landscape. There’s a reason Tommy and Kate got their house so easily, something that’s been hidden for years, something tied to what’s buried deep beneath the city in the ancient catacombs of Becchina.

Clocking in at just under 300 pages, The House of Last Resort moves at quite a clip, establishing the personal gamble Tommy and Kate have made, what’s at stake for them, and how Tommy’s family history relates to their decision, then rocketing straight into the haunted house narrative. Or at least, it starts that way. It’s easy to imagine a version of this story that’s all about winding up the traditional haunted house creeps—bumps in the night, doors that open and shut by themselves, rumblings in the basement—before letting it all go in the final act in a frenzy of ghostly activity, and we know a writer like Golden could make that work. 

But he’s after something more with this book, and what’s most impressive about The House of Last Resort is the way it evolves, naturally and smoothly, from a haunted house narrative to a kind of hybrid family saga and occult thriller over the course of its pages. At no point does it feel like Golden is making unnecessary or unearned leaps, or pushing the internal logic of his narrative too far, and you never lose the thread of where he’s going and how he’s developing these ideas. It just flows under the hand of a practiced master, and that makes it a delight for seasoned horror fans and newcomers to the genre alike. 

The novel’s flow, the kind of narrative briskness that will keep you reading late into the night, is one of its greatest strengths, but it’s the high-concept plotting that will lodge deep in the brains of readers. Golden is, of course, not new to high-concept narratives, but he’s also never let himself rest on his own storytelling laurels. The various layers of the story and the resulting twists and turns in The House of Last Resort are never stale, never outright predictable, and are rooted in warm, relatable character choices that give the novel a sense of life even beyond its hook. If there’s a problem with any of it, it’s only that you end up wishing you’d had a little more time to spend within the creepy corridors of this story, getting to know the characters and the family history just a little bit more. 

But even that sense of slight incompleteness only adds to the book’s power. In Golden’s hands, The House of Last Resort reads like a gripping, relentlessly entertaining ’80s paperback, full of big ideas and bigger payoffs that’ll keep you up all night turning page after page.

The House of Last Resort is now available wherever books are sold.

Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.