Don't be fooled by the title, there's no "horror" here. I kept waiting for someone to pop some music in their 8-track player, but alas, that never happened. Not to mention, it was a real blast from the past reading about the bygone era of 1981, when people went to discos, ate fondue, and let young children play outside unsupervised at all hours of the day and night in subzero temperatures. On a more positive note, the writing itself is fine, for the most part, and the first half of the book was actually not bad at all.
Stuff like that kept bogging the story down to a two-star read. I'm not sure what that was supposed to accomplish-to show us that all of David's girlfriends are boring? There's a scene of Sandy being hypnotized that could have been good, but the author had to hypnotize her two additional times, when once would have packed more of a wallop. There's a whole chapter where David's ex-girlfriend shows up, tells him she still has the hots for him, and then leaves because he says he loves Sandy.
Not only are there a lot of characters, but they all love to talk amongst themselves. Honestly, this could have been a good tale, in a hokey, B-grade horror sort of way, but it was suffocated by the the weight of all the superfluous characters, repetitive and/or unnecessary details, and the sheer length of the book, which outlasted its welcome by at least 100 pages.
Instead, he decides to use Sandy as a conduit for bringing Suzanne back from the grave. Apparently the man who built it, Eben Wallford, accidentally buried his daughter, Suzanne, alive, and was so wracked with guilt that he has been unable to pass over. Their first night there, the owner of the house tells a ghost story about the old mansion next door. But here goes.a bland young couple from the big city, David and Sandy, go to a ski house in the fictitious town of Owlsfane, Vermont, for a week of winter fun. Maybe I should talk about the book now, but I find myself too bored horrified to want to discuss it. (In case anyone is wondering, I did not eat the peppermint.) Due to my love of hokey B-grade horror stories, combined with my fondness for reading books that are obscure and almost forgotten (and usually there's a reason for that), when I came across a description of this book, I immediately thought, "I have to read this! I know it will probably be awful but then I can pretend I sought it out as a public service, to warn other readers from the perils of my mistake." And thanks to the Internet, for a dollar plus shipping, I managed to get a copy from a novelty shop in North Carolina, which included a peppermint with my package.
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