Annal:1997 International Horror Guild Award for Novel

Nazareth Hill

Ramsey Campbell

• 1997 IHG–Novel winner
• Score: 10.47

Oswald Priestley was widowed ten years ago, when his daughter was just a child. He’s done his best to raise her and give her proper values. But now she’s a teenager, convinced she knows everything about life and that her father knows nothing. She’s moody and sullen. She talks back. Her grades are dropping. And to make matters worse, she’s taken up with a boy from the wrong side of the tracks.

Amy Priestley is a normal teenager. Her boyfriend may be lower class, but he’s kind and intelligent. Amy doesn’t remember her mother. She does remember that as a child she was afraid of Nazareth Hill, the abandoned asylum that looms over the town. Now Nazareth Hill has been made into apartments, and she and her father have moved in. Their neighbors are a little eccentric at first, and as time passes, their odd quirks become less amusing and more dangerous. Amy is convinced that something in the building’s past is contaminating its present. Her search for the truth irritates her increasingly irrational father, who is also trapped in a role dictated by Nazareth Hill.