Her sense of reality is in question, and therefore so are her perceptions. The protagonist is not alone in the haunted house, but she does arrive with plenty of emotional baggage, so much so that she becomes an unreliable narrator. Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House has a somewhat similar synopsis. Is it then a first of its kind? Probably not. Yet Julia, published in 1975, predates all of these. Jeffery Konvitz abides by this formula in his novel The Sentinel The story within the film Sensoria follows this pattern as well. Or maybe, these encounters are one and the same with what has haunted them in the past maybe these are old phantoms disguised as something new. Often they are burdened with the baggage of tragedies past, and this only makes their haunting encounters all the more unbearable. Authors Darcy Coates and Blair Shaw, for instance, have published several stories about women who suddenly find themselves living alone in a haunted house. Many of the haunted house novels and movies that I have absorbed follow a formula similar to this.

Julia’s first purchase upon leaving her husband is a large, old-fashioned house in Kensington, where she plans to live by herself well away from her soon-to-be ex and the home where their young daughter died.ĭoes the mysterious girl have something to do with her daughter’s death? Is Julia being haunted by ghosts? Who is that young mysterious blonde girl that she keeps encountering in the nearby neighborhood? And why does Julia sometimes hear the sounds of someone rummaging around her house while she sleeps at night. She struggles to make sense of her new surroundings. Here’s the synopsis – A woman (Julia) fleeing a troubled past finds herself living in a haunted house. Okay, okay – I’ll stop dripping out these qualifying phrases and get to the heart of the matter. I don’t, however, love Julia, a novel by Peter Straub. I love “Julia Dream”, a song by Pink Floyd.

Ghost story straub novel book review