Maynard's House

I read this book 30 years ago and loved it so much that I bought it and read it again (I rarely read a book more than once). It's the kind of book that makes you flip back through the pages to re-read about an earlier event. Combine the long new England winter with the tale of a witch's house--a house that had to burned down or the witch's soul would return to the house--the witch's tree and other supernatural events, and you have a page-turner that is difficult to put down. The ending will make you go back and re-read the first several pages. The main character's experiences will perplex you as he finds himself in the middle of a frightening ritual, and his transformation from the beginning of the novel to the end will surprise you.

I read Herman Raucher's MAYNARD'S HOUSE a long time ago, when it first came out in 1980. Crossing paths once again just a week ago, I remembered not so much the story as the feeling it gave. It is a tale imbued with considerable atmosphere, a profitable thing for a ghost story if it is to work.At it's heart, MH is the story of a young bedeviled Vietnam war vet with issues, Austin Fletcher, who is willed a small house deep in the woods of northern Maine by a fellow soldier and confidante, Maynard Whittier, killed in action by a wayward mortar shell. Austin--"a sailboat awaiting a breeze"--makes the trip for his new home. The landscape is an intoxicating blend of claustrophobic interiors and endless frozen wastelands. Little by little, the mysterious force in the house asserts itself until neither Austin nor the reader is exactly sure what is in his mind and what is real. Raucher plays to his strength here: "A man can be crazy only if there's someone around to tell him that such is the case." Austin's disturbing isolation is well managed and chillingly realized. And just when our hero's had enough and is ready to quit the place, a blizzard arrives and the real haunting begins.There are problems here, however. The story strains and struggles to explain itself in many places. The often-elegant prose is peppered with outdated language, loaded with extraneous simile and metaphor. Drawn tight, this would have made a superior novella. There is a price to pay for stretching. It is the stylistic difference between extrapolation and interpolation.A good ending--so often lacking in novels of this type--can go a long way toward saving a book. MAYNARD'S HOUSE has one. And maybe, just for that reason, twenty years from now, perhaps I'll read it all again.

A fascinating, scary read that contains vivid imaging, putting the reader right in the middle of the action ... and the nightmare. This story contains all the elements that scare us half to death when we're home all alone at night....the chair rocking when no one's in it, a fire in the fireplace that never stays lit, and frightening animals wandering through the woods just outside the safety of the house. The best phrase to describe the house setting comes from the book itself.."Robert Frost by day, and Nathaniel Hawthorne by night." Although I've read this a number of times, the ending still makes me think that I need to read it again, that there is more in there, but we have to find it ourselves. A must read for anyone who likes a good old fashioned ghost story....no special effects, no fancy gadgets. Just a man against an old house and his inner demons. The reader will often wonder "what would I do?" Sometimes Austin follows your advice and sometimes...he doesn't.

I've read this story twice and enjoyed it both times. It's really in the traditional ghost story genre, heavy with atmosphere, though the hero is atypical (Vietnam vet) and the story is definitely in a male voice. The burnt-out vet (likeable, and you do identify with him) travels up to back-country Maine in mid-winter to live in the cabin he has inherited from his war buddy, "Maynard." It turns out to be a very strange place. Extremely isolated, at first it seems he only has to worry about physical survival. The haunting or supernatural part is subtle and complex - I still haven't figured it all out, but it has to do not only with Marnard and the house but what happened hundreds of years before. Well written! There is a sequence with a hat, blown by the wind, that follows the hero home, scaring him very badly. That sort of thing is hard to write credibly - the author does just fine, I was definitely spooked. The ending is nightmarish. The sense of atmosphere is thick and prevailing, this is one of those books that is more a "place" than a story. Maybe the reason it's out of print is that the ghost story audience hasn't caught onto it, the author being mainly know for "Summer of '42."