Books with category 🏚 Hunted House
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Plain Bad Heroines

Our story begins in 1902, at the Brookhants School for Girls. Flo and Clara, two impressionable students, are obsessed with each other and with a daring young writer named Mary MacLane, the author of a scandalous bestselling memoir. To show their devotion to Mary, the girls establish their own private club and call it the Plain Bad Heroine Society. They meet in secret in a nearby apple orchard, the setting of their wildest happiness and, ultimately, of their macabre deaths. This is where their bodies are later discovered with a copy of Mary's book splayed beside them, the victims of a swarm of stinging, angry yellow jackets. Less than five years later, the Brookhants School for Girls closes its doors forever—but not before three more people mysteriously die on the property, each in a most troubling way.

Over a century later, the now abandoned and crumbling Brookhants is back in the news when wunderkind writer Merritt Emmons publishes a breakout book celebrating the queer, feminist history surrounding the “haunted and cursed” Gilded Age institution. Her bestselling book inspires a controversial horror film adaptation starring celebrity actor and lesbian it girl Harper Harper playing the ill-fated heroine Flo, opposite B-list actress and former child star Audrey Wells as Clara. But as Brookhants opens its gates once again, and our three modern heroines arrive on set to begin filming, past and present become grimly entangled—or perhaps just grimly exploited—and soon it's impossible to tell where the curse leaves off and Hollywood begins.

Mexican Gothic

After receiving a frantic letter from her newly-wed cousin begging for someone to save her from a mysterious doom, Noemí Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. She's not sure what she will find—her cousin's husband, a handsome Englishman, is a stranger, and Noemí knows little about the region.

NoemĂ­ is also an unlikely rescuer: She's a glamorous debutante, and her chic gowns and perfect red lipstick are more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she's also tough and smart, with an indomitable will, and she is not afraid: Not of her cousin's new husband, who is both menacing and alluring; not of his father, the ancient patriarch who seems to be fascinated by NoemĂ­; and not even of the house itself, which begins to invade NoemĂ­'s dreams with visions of blood and doom.

Her only ally in this inhospitable abode is the family's youngest son. Shy and gentle, he seems to want to help NoemĂ­, but might also be hiding dark knowledge of his family's past. For there are many secrets behind the walls of High Place. The family's once colossal wealth and faded mining empire kept them from prying eyes, but as NoemĂ­ digs deeper she unearths stories of violence and madness.

And NoemĂ­, mesmerized by the terrifying yet seductive world of High Place, may soon find it impossible to ever leave this enigmatic house behind.

The Turn of the Screw

1898

by Henry James

The Turn of the Screw is an 1898 horror novella by Henry James, first serialized in Collier's Weekly magazine from January 27 to April 16, 1898, and later published in book form as part of The Two Magics by Macmillan in New York City and Heinemann in London. The novella tells the story of a very young woman's first job as a governess for two enigmatic children, Miles and Flora, at a desolate estate. The governess soon encounters half-seen figures who glare from dark towers and dusty windows - silent, foul phantoms that increasingly come closer, threatening the innocence of her charges.

The governess realizes with horror that these fiendish creatures want the children, aiming to corrupt their bodies, possess their minds, and own their souls. But the terror deepens when it becomes evident that Miles and Flora have no fear of the evil that stalks them, for they desire the presence of the walking dead just as fervently as the dead yearn for them.

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