Superstitious

On the small Pennsylvania college campus Liam O'Connor cuts a dashing, romantic figure. The Irish-born professor of folklore has good looks, a sweet charm, and a host of Old World superstitions - all of which dazzle beautiful graduate student Sara Morgan. Plunging headlong into a sudden love affair, Sara barely has time to notice the dark drama unfolding on the campus. Four murders have been committed, each more gruesomely horrifying than the one before it, each committed by someone, or something, with terrible fury and strength. Suddenly Sara is receiving crank phone calls, warning her to stay away from Liam ... fearing her ex-boyfriend Chip's next angry outburst ... wondering why Liam's unmarried sister, Margaret, is so suffocatingly close to them ... and trying to escape the lecherous stares of her boss, Milton Cohn, the dean of students and the owner of a murderous-looking knife collection. When Liam proposes marriage, Sara accepts, making love by the light of sixteen candles, one of Liam's superstitions. Somehow, that final step seals her fate. The police begin to close in on a killer, the death toll mounts, and Sara is caught in an ever-tightening web. At its center, behind the most innocent superstitions, waits the greatest terror of all...

A graduate student, Sara has just begun her studies at Moore College, when she meets Irish folklore professor Liam O'Connor. The attraction is mutual. Liam has only one flaw, he's very superstitious. When Liam proposes marriage, Sara is elated. Not even the brutal killer that's terrorizing campus can take away her joy. But to her horror, Sara is about to learn why Liam has a good reason to be superstitious. 2 cassettes.

Stine is the world's bestselling horror writer for children, but this is his first novel for adults. Liam is a bachelor professor of folklore and he's incurably superstitious. When people start getting murdered, it seems that Liam's demons are real.

Publishers Weekly

Stine has written 56 YA novels and one adult novel, all horror. Readers will recognize this as the adult novel because it's hardcover and several characters in it curse, enjoy X-rated sex and die gruesomely detailed deaths. Otherwise, this simple, sturdy story of occult mayhem on a bucolic college campus features the sort of crude yet functional casting, plotting and prose that have made Stine America's bestselling YA author: characters verge on caricature, for easy identification; stormy nights and cliff-hangers abound; and no-frills prose, arranged in short sentences and paragraphs for speed reading, tells the tale (``The fingers stab deep. Her eyeballs make a soft plop plop as they are pried out''). Even those with minimal attention spans will keep turning pages as grad student Sara Morgan meets and marries hunky prof Liam Morgan. So what if Liam has a murky past, lives with his sister and takes his field-Irish folklore-so seriously that he throws salt over his shoulder for good luck and cringes in terror when a black cat jumps on his lap? Does that mean he's involved in the brutal mutilation-murders that are plaguing Moore State? Stine shakes a finger at two other suspects but doesn't reveal the reason for the bloodletting until novel's end. And that's just as well since, like the rest of this story, the underlying premise is about as sophisticated, though as effective, as jumping out from a dark corner and yelling ``boo!'' Major ad/promo; film rights to Miramax (Brandon Tartikoff, producer); Time/Warner audio due in October; author tour. (Sept.)

Robert Lawrence Stine began career as an author writing short stories and joke books -- but in the early 1990's, he introduced the wildly popular Goosebumps series. The books sold millions of copies, and made reading frighteningly fun again for kids.