Perhaps the point could be made - since I am obviously really enjoying this year's excursion into horror genre - that I am going back to my adolescent years when my reading choices (completely informed by what public libraries in my hometown had to offer) went for best-selling, pulse-racing, fast-moving titles of likes as Sidney Sheldon or Harold Robbins. I gobbled them all, without ever remembering anything about them except that they kept me awake until dawn. And now, after years of reading all kinds of things, I have suddenly re-discovered that forgotten excitement of being completely lost in a plot - even knowing and fully understanding that this might not be (with exception of wonderful Shirley Jackson) not exactly a earth-shaking, life-affirming literary masterpiece but for me reading is all about escapism anyway.
After Peter Ackroyd's interesting but, frankly, complex history of England (at certain point I just lost the focus with the long list of kings who were slaying, poisoning, arresting and murdering each predecessor) I wanted something completely different so browsing trough my virtual library I decided to check this 1980 horror bestseller which seems like something my younger self would love. "Comes the Blind Fury" is a clever combination of two horror sub-genres, haunted house and ghost story - the main antagonist is the ghost of a blind girl who lived in Paradise Point a century ago and is now full of blind fury in order to revenge her death, caused by evil schoolchildren. In present time, the new family (the Pendletons) comes to town and as they settle in a spacious, old house, we became aware that something is wrong about this place, in fact with these local people as well. Twelve year old Michelle is overjoyed to discover an old porcelain doll in her room and immediately gives her name Amanda, getting closer to the doll than to her little school friends - as it happens, we soon find out that this is the name from a local gravestone and true identity of the blind girl who disappeared a century ago. Strange things start happening, the porcelain doll whispers into Michelle's ears, local schoolchildren start dying and it all gets seriously gripping - even with my daily workload I managed to gulp the novel in two days - its not exactly a literary masterpiece but rather a very enjoyable escape from reality and kind of the novel I would loved back in my teens (apparently, part of me still loves this kind of psycho thriller). It's all very cleverly done and has enough chill factor to keep the reader glued to the very last page. Where the epilogue neatly suggest that the story is far from over.
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