Gail J Foster, $3.99, ISBN 978-1951580643
Gothic Romance, 2021 (Reissue)
The House That Samael Built is the late Ruby Jean Jensen’s first published novel, and while marketed as horror, it’s more of a Gothic romance. It takes longer for our heroine Tara to bump into Scott Yates, our real estate agent, than a typical romance couple normally would. However, once they do, the tone of the story shifts from psychological horror to the more familiar pacing and puddling of a Gothic romance set in a big spooky house, one that sees our heroine doing a lot of walking up and down, often in dimly lit passages and rooms.
This one was published in 1974, so it’s a story set in a time when hippies are the boogeymen of society and public payphones are the only way you can call someone when you’re outside, and that’s provided you have enough coins to feed into the phone.
Tara, 23, is pretty sheltered when it comes to the big bad world outside of Nebraska. Faced with marrying a man that she cares little for and braving the world on her own after the death of her mother, she chooses the latter. Well, it’s not long when she staggers into San Francisco, broke and jobless. Alas, our heroine can’t find a waitress gig, so… she just sort of give up. I don’t get it, maybe it’s because she doesn’t wear flowers on her hair or something?
Still, she falls in with a bunch of hippies that behave a lot like Charles Manson and his happily family. Fortunately, Tara avoids a helter skelter of an ending to her story when she opts to help care for the pregnant Amy, even if it means the two of them being stuck in a big house that could very well be haunted. What can go wrong?
Despite much of Tara being a creation to expedite plot development instead of an organic, believable personality in her own right, I have to say that I like this lady because, for all her naïveté, she isn’t dumb. She catches on quickly when she’s in situations new to her, and she has a spine hard enough to let her stand up to people that try to walk all over her. Tara is a nice example of a heroine that may have more limited options at a time when opportunities afforded to her are defined by gender roles, but that doesn’t mean she has to be submissive or placid.
It’s just shame that, as the story progresses, her actions and decisions begin to revolve more about what the plot needs rather than what one may naturally want to do in a certain situation.
As for the story, the first handful of chapters are a solid, gripping read because the author has a knack for making me care about Tara. I find myself empathizing with her and I want her to overcome the hurdles she has to face. However, once she’s in that house, the momentum of the story starts to flag. I find myself subjected to increasingly repetitive scenes of our dear walking around places looking for things like towel, over way too many pages, and the whole thing starts to resemble a sluggish Big Brother live feed with all the contestants being either high strung or doped out.
Worst of all, the ending sees the story just fizzling out in a most anticlimactic “Oh? That’s it? That’s all?” manner. I’m surprised when I reach that part, because I am pretty sure that the next twenty pages must be missing or something. How can the story just end like that? The whole tone can be summed up as “Hmm… maybe it’s not good bad idea for so and so to happen… but whatever, it’s the end so I am clocking off now!”
Therefore, this one can be good while the good time lasts. Just watch out for how the story soon goes off the rails and skids off first to boredom central and then a bewildering anticlimactic ending. I don’t know what happened. Did the author run out of ideas for the story by the halfway point?
