‘Maynard’s House’ ( 262 pp) was published by Berkley Books in September 1981. The cover artist is uncredited.
As the novel opens, it’s the Winter of 1972/1973, and a young Vietnam War veteran named Austin Fletcher is travelling to Belden, Maine, where he has inherited the home of a deceased fellow soldier: Maynard Whittier.
Fletcher is a callow and self-centered individual who is completely unprepared for life in the snows and cold of the Maine wilderness, but trapped in a kind of existential anomie, he nonetheless proceeds to take occupancy of Maynard’s House. Fletcher gradually arrives at a kind of stumbling familiarity with living a 19th century existence, one requiring the use of an outhouse, a dependence on a stockpile of canned goods, and the absence of both telephone and electricity.
The locals believe the house to be haunted, and there are rumors of long-ago atrocities linked to witchcraft. Fletcher gradually becomes aware that some of the bumps and creaks he hears in the house in the still depths of the Winter nights may have a supernatural origin.
As the season wears on, strange things begin to happen…………things that will culminate in a confrontation that Austin Fletcher is poorly equipped to survive………..
At the time ‘Maynard’s House’ was published, author Herman Raucher was a well-known and successful novelist (The Summer of '42). However, basing a 262 page novel on a plot involving a man and his haunted house is a formidable task for even a skilled author, and the book suffers from a surplus of padding in the form of internal monologues, the reading of Maynard's personal diary, encounters with Maine eccentrics, etc.
It’s also clear that Raucher took the easy path to lending momentum to the narrative, via the expedient of inserting plot developments that may be ‘real’ scares, or, just as likely, phantasms derived from the increasingly poor mental state of Austin Fletcher.
Having labored to create an atmosphere of growing tension and menace through the first 20 of the novel’s 24 chapters, Raucher necessarily was obliged to craft a denouement that justified this elaborate narrative scaffolding. But in my opinion, the final chapters of ‘House’ are the weakest. Raucher piles on one horror cliché after another, leaving the reader with a mess of possible interpretations (none of which I found very convincing) for the spooky goings-on.
The verdict ? Only the most avid collectors of Paperbacks from Hell are going to want a copy of ‘Maynard’s House’. All others can leave this one on the shelf.
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