The Uninvited - Steven LaChance

Yes, I will admit I am a book snob. I was actually embarrassed to carry this one around with me. But it was the next selection for our book club, so I had no choice. I was even embarrassed when I went into Barnes & Noble to buy the book, as it was buried deep within the "New Age" section. But see, this is the beauty of book clubs...we read books that I would never in a million years pick up on my own.

Here was the appeal: it was our October selection, and it was a true story about a haunted house in a small town near St. Louis MO. Time to open our minds!

Steven LaChance was a single dad with three children trying to make ends meet, skipping around from apartment to apartment. He found an ad for a house (with a backyard!) for a very reasonable price. The ad said it was perfect for kids. Sold!

Well, our mothers teach us that if it seems too good to be true...which was the case here. As early as move-in day, weird things started happening. Pictures fell off the wall. Rooms got suddenly cold. Electric energy would pass through their bodies. They saw shadowy figures aggressively approaching them, they heard screaming, they saw bodies hanging from the trees. It didn't take long before they got the hell out, and the house was rented to another family.

The next family wasn't so smart. They could not afford to move once the bullshittery started, so they decided to seek help and try to ride it out. Steven felt compelled to help out these poor souls, and befriended Helen, the grandmotherly woman of the house. The longer she stayed, the more serious the hauntings became. She was "raped" by a dark figure in the house. She had bites and bruises on her body. She started acting possessed just shy of pea soup, and had impulses of suicide and homicide.

They learned that the house was built over land that was once a burial ground for slaves. They sought help from psychics, priests and medical personnel. Eventually, both Steven and Helen recovered from their experience, and Steven has dedicated himself to helping others with similar issues.

Do I believe it? That is hard to say. I am a very open-minded gal, and this guy seems pretty earnest. I couldn't find any skeptical evidence against him online. He even has (questionable) pictures taken within the house. I guess I can go with it...why not, just for grins?

I was, however, a bit put-off by Mr. LaChance's flair for the dramatic. He kept pulling out these corny lines like "That was the beginning of Helen's last week in the house, but the start of many new nightmares for us both" and "In the years to come I would try to figure out why it all went so wrong so fast". I was frustrated by Helen's refusal to leave the house. She called Steven alot in the middle of the night, she cried alot, she asked for help alot. Here's the deal. If a spirit were raping me, I think I'd live in a homeless shelter before I spent one more night in that house, so I found all of this a bit hard to swallow. I was beleaguered with questions like...if Mr. LaChance was so disturbed by his experiences in the haunted house, why did he keep going back, even after he'd moved? Why did he blame everything bad that happened to him (even after he'd left the house) to some demon that apparently wanted him dead? Personally, I think at this point, La Chance was milking it. Coincidentally, he had become unemployed right about this time and perhaps needed an income stream?

On the positive side of things, La Chance did find God as a result of his tribulations. And he has dedicated himself to helping others suffering from evil beasties find God as well.

The book club's takeaway:

Most of the book club found the book to be frightening. Like "I can't read this at night" frightening. As a whole, we all agreed we could believe in the idea of spirits...almost everyone had a story about other-worldly things that had happened to them or a friend, particularly around the time they had lost a loved one. There was some discussion about the sensitivity of children and pets to these types of things (kids who had "seen" and talked to dead grandparents), and the fear of anything weird that happens between 3am and 5am. One member of the book club even once worked for a group of ghost hunters that went around the country investigating occurances, attempting to prove their falsehood. We all agreed that the prose in the story was pretty lame and pedestrian. Overall, however, I think most of the club members liked the story a bit more than I.


2.5 out of 5 stars