From Printz Honor winning author Lily Anderson comes a young adult horror that follows Arden and her three best friends as their graduation party at an abandoned mansion turns into a bloody fight for survival.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Lily Anderson’s Killer House Party, which is out now.
Red Solo cups? Check. Snacks? Check. Abandoned mansion full of countless horrors that won’t let you leave? Check.
The Deinhart Manor has been a looming shadow over town for as long as anyone can remember, and it’s been abandoned for even longer. When the final Deinhart descendent passes, the huge gothic manor is up for sale for the first time ever. Which means Arden can steal the keys from her mom’s real estate office…
It’s time for a graduation party that no one will ever forget. Arden and her best friends Maddy, Remi, and Shane, each have different reasons for wanting to throw the party to end all parties. But when the manor doors bar everyone inside and the walls begin to bleed, all anyone wants to do is make it out alive.
Every town has a haunted house. The Deinhart Manor was ours.
What happened to the Deinhart family was the first scary story I ever heard. My dad told it to me many times, especially on Halloween. He grew up in Bucktown, looking up at the abandoned house on the hill. He loved the mystery and macabre grandeur of it.
This is his version of the story.
Almost exactly 100 years ago… (It’s always “almost exactly” no matter the year, but really it was some time between World War I and World War II.)
The Deinharts were the richest family in Bucktown. Mr. Deinhart owned the onion plant (where the bowling alley is now) and employed most of the men in town. Mrs. Deinhart wore fur coats and long strings of pearls. They had more money than God. More money than sense.
Back then, Founders Hill was a public park. It was covered in wildflowers and a grove of fruit and nut trees. People would picnic there and look out at the beautiful view of the town.
Until the Deinharts bought the park and the hill beneath it. A fence went up with a sign warning trespassers to keep out under threat of violence. The Deinharts built their mansion there, on the most desirable piece of land in the county.
The people in town watched as the hill’s trees sagged with a harvest that the Deinharts did not need. The sweet stench of rotting apples and overripe plums blew downwind and into their homes. Hatred for the Deinhart family grew. Festered. Metastasized into a curse. The town wanted the Deinhart family gone.
And then the Deinharts started to die.
There were five children in the Deinhart family, and they died in the same order they were born. The eldest fell down the stairs and crushed his skull on the way down. The second ate one of the hill’s apples, bit into the seeds, and died of cyanide poisoning. The third took her own life to escape the terror of waiting for the curse. Then there were two. A son and a daughter. Mr. and Mrs. Deinhart grew terrified that they would lose their last children. So terrified that they made a deal with the Devil.
(“Really? The Devil?” I’d ask. We were only Christmas trees and Easter eggs religious, not a literal horns-and-pitchfork devil religious. “The Devil always shows up where there’s enough money,” Dad would say. This led to me screaming in terror when I got a $50 bill from my grandma on my seventh birthday.)
The Devil told them, “Your family is cursed. The only way to break it is for one of you to die. Trade your life for your child’s.”
Mr. and Mrs. Deinhart didn’t believe it. Well, they refused to believe it, which is different. Refusing to believe is pretending with the truth stuck in your stomach. They sent the Devil away and took their own precautions. They refused to eat anything but canned food and powdered milk. They shut the children away in the Manor and boarded up all the doors and windows.
Eventually, one of the kids got sick. No one knows how because the only germs in the house were their own. But the Deinhart parents got scared. Not only out of fear for the child, but fear for themselves. The Devil’s warning didn’t seem so ridiculous now. As the child’s fever grew, so did their paranoia. The only way to stop the curse was for one of the parents to die. And neither of them was volunteering. They slept with knives under their pillows. Then they stopped sleeping altogether. They circled each other, sure that the other was planning their death. The house had seen so much death, it could feel that another was close.
Was the curse broken? I don’t know. The family never left. Not by foot or hearse.
They’re still in that house today, long since dead. And together forever.
Sounds like Hell, doesn’t it?
