Jo Nesbo

From the internationally best-selling author, a chilling fresh spin on the classic horror novel • When the voices call, don't answer. “In The Night House, the horror begins immediately. And it only keeps calling from there.”—Josh Malerman, New York Times best-selling author of Bird Box and Spin a Black Yarn In the wake of his parents’ tragic deaths in a house fire, fourteen-year-old Richard Elauved has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle in the remote, insular town of Ballantyne. Richard quickly earns a reputation as an outcast, and when a classmate named Tom goes missing, everyone suspects the new, angry boy is responsible for his disappearance. No one believes him when he says the telephone booth out by the edge of the woods sucked Tom into the receiver like something out of a horror movie. No one, that is, except Karen, a beguiling fellow outsider who encourages Richard to pursue clues the police refuse to investigate. He traces the number that Tom prank-called from the phone booth to an abandoned house in the Mirror Forest. There he catches a glimpse of a terrifying face in the window. And then the voices begin to whisper in his ear . . . She’s going to burn. The girl you love is going to burn. There’s nothing you can do about it.

A novel

The Night House

Laura Dobie

I'm scared of heights. I'm scared of darkness. I'm scared of water. I'm scared of fire. And I'm scared of telephones. But most of all, I'm scared of being scared. Well, I'm not scared of being scared the way I am when I'm huddled up next to my dad watching a zombie film. But I'm scared of being so scared of something going badly wrong, like a key breaking in a lock, or the passageway between the bedroom and the front door bursting into flames, I'm scared of being so trapped in being scared that I can never find my way out again.

I had been hoping she would have let herself go. That she would have lost her spark, her charm, that irresistible aura that might well have come from the very fact that she knew that she was irresistible, at least for a certain type of boy. I had been hoping that I would come here, make sense of everything, laugh it all off as a nostalgic memory now that my Karen Taylor was gone, torn down from her pedestal. And that I could have a bit of fun with effortless reminiscences, then go home a free man, liberated from this dream that had really been a bit of a nightmare, and had cost me so much time and energy. 

Karen was exactly the same, just with slightly more pronounced features and curves. And she smiled at me like I was the only person in the world, and gestured that the desk beside her was free with complete self- confidence. I felt my heart beat with unfeigned delight. Damn.

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