3/5
(This review refers to the 1999 version, included in the anthology
999: Twenty-nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense, not to the 2009 reissue in hardback. I am unsure if there are substantive differences in the text.)
Elsewhere
is an eerie little haunted-house story strong on atmospherics and
clever dialogue, but one which ultimately disappoints with a pretty
stock resolution.
Ambitious real estate agent Joan Freeboard is
offered a huge fee if she can sell Elsewhere, a notoriously haunted mansion on an
island in the Hudson river. Known as the scene of a particularly
gruesome murder-suicide, even the family heirs refuse to live in it,
decamping to Italy and putting it on the market.
Joan knows she
has to do something to dispel the ridiculous rumors, so in order to
clear the house's reputation she hatches a clever PR plan: she retains
the services of a psychic, an occult expert from NYU, and her closest
friend, award-winning but creatively blocked writer Terence Dare, to spend five days with her at Elsewhere.
If all goes well, they can debunk the ghost stories, and Terence can break his dry spell by
writing an account of the experiment for a high-profile magazine -- which
will also serve as excellent publicity for the house's sale. Win-win, right?
Needless to say, things don't go as planned. But I'll bet you expected that. (At least you did if you've ever read
The Haunting of Hill House.)
And that's the real problem with
Elsewhere:
it's just a bit too predictable to actually be scary. Perhaps that's
unfair, since the novella was originally published in 1999 -- earlier
than some of the works it ultimately feels derivative of. But if you're
up on your contemporary horror, you can see the end coming from miles
away. This is especially irritating because, a) we all know Blatty is
fully capable of scaring the crap out of readers; and b) because the
story's setup seems so obvious you're sure the twist simply
can't be what you think it is. And yet.
Elsewhere
was a perfectly fine way to while away a Sunday afternoon, and I'm not
sorry I read it; I just wish I'd read it before subsequent works made it
essentially redundant.
