Nazareth Hill

From AwardAnnals

Book:	Nazareth Hill
Author:	Ramsey Campbell
Honors:	1997 IHG–Novel winner Score: 10.47
Genres:	Horror books Mystery/Suspense books Speculative Fiction books Action/Adventure books
Publisher:	Tom Doherty Assoc Llc

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.

When the truth becomes known, no one wants to believe it—not Amy’s boyfriend, not her former allies among Nazareth Hill’s tenants, and especially not her father. It is said that the truth shall set you free. In Nazareth Hill, the truth brings captivity and death.

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This book was also released under the title The House on Nazareth Hill.

Reviews

Amazon.com

“Must survive until they take me from this place.” Scribbled in the margins of an ancient, moldy Bible, found wedged between the roots of a tree, is the truth about what Nazarill (now a luxury apartment building) was centuries ago. Sixteen-year-old Amy struggles to decipher the messages as her father becomes increasingly dictatorial, fanatical, and monstrous. This perfectly constructed, richly terrifying novel will satisfy even those readers who’ve been reluctant about Ramsey Campbell. As S.T. Joshi, award-winning scholar of weird fiction, writes in Necrofile, “Nazareth Hill will not be long in taking rank as one of the finest haunted house novels in literature, rivaling even Shirley Jackson’s masterful The Haunting of Hill House…. With this novel [Campbell] has unified the many themes of his earlier work—pure supernaturalism; exploration of social and domestic trauma; chilling portrayal of psychosis—in a seamless fusion.”

Note: The House on Nazareth Hill is the title of the Headline Press U.K. edition of this book.