Wildwood Road

Publishers Weekly

Anxieties over marriage, home and work amplify the eeriness of Golden's engrossing suburban horror novel. Michael and Jillian Dansky are heading home from a Halloween party when they give a young girl on the road a lift to a strange old mansion. She leaves them with the injunction to "come find me," and suddenly their lives are no longer the same. Michael, art director at an advertising firm, begins to incorporate the girl's features into his illustrations. When he tries to locate the house and its road, he can't. Then a coven of grotesque, wraithlike women attack him and Jillian, who's transformed into a brittle and bitchy harridan. Michael realizes his survival depends on retracing his steps on that fateful night and finding the elusive girl. Golden (The Boys Are Back in Town, etc.) knows how to craft suspense, but the bizarre incidents create expectations that the climax only partly satisfies, and the horror, once explained, has a preachy, politically correct edge. Still, this above-average stab at Stephen King-style horror draws the reader irresistibly into its mystery. (Apr. 5) FYI: Cemetery Dance (www.cemeterydance. com) is publishing the cloth edition ($40 ISBN 1-58767-119-0). Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Haunted house tale, restrained and adult. Driving home from a masquerade with his wife Jillian passed out on the back seat, Michael Dansky falls asleep at the wheel and almost hits a little girl standing on the dark roadside. He takes her home to a house on a hill on unlighted Wildwood Road. The big house, a shambles, looks like "a relic out of time, as if it had been decorated in the 1940s, and remained untouched since then." It has a light only in its turret. Oddly, the girl tells him, Find me if you can, and goes in alone. Michael thinks better of this, goes in himself, looks through room after dark room for her. He comes upon silver rippling ghosts and throws himself out a window to escape them. Michael is top artist with an ad agency, a job Golden does well in dramatizing, and Jillian is the admired top paralegal at her law firm. One night, Michael comes home to find gray female ghosts attacking her. They suck Jillian's childhood memories out of her, and in daily life she slowly becomes a bitter cynic, all sweet memories of youth and childhood gone. To recover his new bitch-wife's lost mind, Michael seeks out the dark house but can't find it. He does see the little girl, Susan Barnes, standing by For Sale signs in the dark. When he looks up the last realtor who tried to sell the dark house, a house that moves about not only New England but Europe as well, he finds the name Susan Barnes. What's clear is that the little girl is Susan's lost childhood. Susan's bitter son tells him that his well-loved mother went bitch-crazy two years earlier and since then has been lodged in a psyche ward. Now Michael must take Jillian to the dark house. May be Golden's best and a step up from 2004'sThe Boys Are Back in Town.