Product Description

The spookiest novel you will read this year - a thrilling masterpiece. Not to be read before going to sleep!

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9600 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Wigan Evening Post
'this brilliant and chilling novel . . . will keep readers on the edge of their seats until the very last page.'

Review

'A clever thriller : spooky, atmospheric, often genuinely frightening.  Another auspicious debut.'

(Peter Guttridge )

'Echoes of the Blair Witch Project resonate throughout this chilling novel.  Cottam's elaborate haunting needs some indulgence, but his his adenaline-chargedprose is drawn tight with suspense.'

(Financial Times )

"Extremely well written . . .Old-fashioned suspense combined with modern horror imagery to produce a fine example of the genre."

(The Times )

About the Author
F.G. Cottam turns to a dark episode in Britain's past for the inspiration for this novel. A former magazine editor, he has two children.

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Customer Reviews

Extremely frightening - read with all the lights on!
This is a beautifully written & evocative debut novel set in both contemporary Britain and the period between the two world wars. It is extremely frightening. The characters are well drawn & feature real figures from the past such as Alesteir Crowley & Dennis Wheatley.
If you like your fiction truly scary, I recommend this book which you will find hard to put down once started.

More sinister than really scary...
The novel starts at the funeral of a young Philosophy student who has committed suicide having visited the haunted Fischer House. As her fellow students also show signs of mental illness and attempt suicide it becomes clear that they can only be helped by one man; Paul Seaton. Seaton visited the house ten years before and has been one of the only people to survive.

The structure of the novel is impressive and the plot is quite intricate as Seaton tells his story to the brother of the girl who has most recently tried to commit suicide. Within his story is another story; that of the photographer Pandora Gibson-Hoare, who was a witness to the terrible crime that occurred at the Fischer House in the 1920's.

Throughout the first fifty pages of this book I was having some difficulty engaging with the plot, and the characters; but then something happened and the book really started to become more absorbing. I don't think that the book was really scary and the ending was a little over the top, but there was a pervading sense of the sinister which was really well sustained.

I look forward to his next novel.

A superbly written, multi-layered Gothic treat--more than just a horror story!
I read a lot of Gothic and Supernatural fiction, both for pleasure and as a member of a literary committee, and I can highly recommend 'The House of Lost Souls', a truly impressive debut novel. The structure of the narrative, with its multi-layered stories--one in the 1920s, one in the present time and the central event in the 1980s, is cleverly conceived , the plot is thoroughly absorbing and the atmosphere extremely evocative and chilling. By chapter three, I was totally hooked and unable to put the book down. The story weaves together real and fictional characters (one quibble, any descendents of the late Dennis Wheatley could be faintly shocked by the suggestion that he practised Black Arts, something Wheatley always denied) and, while this will appeal to horror fans, I feel it has an extra dimension in the central theme of Paul Seaton's lost, washed up life and the choices he faces. A gripping horror novel, but also good literary writing.Loved it!