Terror has a healthy appetite in Bram Stoker Award winner Tim Waggoner’s The Forever House [March 2020, Flame Tree Press].
Move over Collins, Munsters, and Addams, there’s a new breed of nightmarish neighbours coming to town. In The Forever House, a sleepy cul-de-sac with a dark past gets a new lesson in residential horror when the Eldreds move in. The Eldreds aren’t the sort of folks that anybody would race to send the welcome wagon out to, either. It’s not simply because the family of five has just moved into the Raines’ old home, the house at the bottom of the cul-de-sac where a mother went insane and murdered her entire family a few years prior, it’s that everything about the Eldreds—from their car (which makes Vantablack pale by comparison) to their names, to the strange inability to actually get a good look at any one of them (especially the one with the robotic movements and glowing green eyes)—are so frightfully unusual.
Unfortunately, “unusual” would be a rather massive understatement in the Eldreds case, because not only are the five new neighbours decidedly odd, but they are also categorically other. The Eldreds are an ageless, inhuman species that feed on the negative emotions of humans, replenishing themselves on the delicacies of human terror, prejudices, and resentments. Now, the residents of the seemingly quiet cul-de-sac promise a feast of the sort of buffet of dysfunction only suburbia can offer. With heapings of narcissism, bigotry, abuse, and marital discord, the residents of Rockridge have enough skeletons in their closets to fill the metaphorical bellies of the Eldreds for years.
Which, of course, is exactly why the Eldreds chose them. When the residents find themselves lured—and trapped—inside the House of Blood, they’ll have to survive their worst fears and deepest, darkest secrets if they are to have any hope of getting out alive. Even then, it’s probably not going to happen.
Fast-paced, hair-raising, and with a twist ending with enough spin to make you rethink who the real monsters are, The Forever House is the sort of phantasmagorical terror that keeps you reading through gore, grit, and grime until the very end.
The Forever House is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers as of March 26th 2020.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
In Rockridge, Ohio, a sinister family moves into a sleepy cul de sac. The Eldreds feed on the negative emotions of humans, creating nightmarish realms within their house to entrap their prey. Neighbors are lured into the Eldreds’ home and faced with challenges designed to heighten their darkest emotions so their inhuman captors can feed and feed well. If the humans are to have any hope of survival, they’ll have to learn to overcome their prejudices and resentments toward one another and work together. But which will prove more deadly in the end, the Eldred . . . or each other?
