Originally released in 2005 and published as a mass market paperback under the Pinnacle Imprint, The Tower is Simon Clark in fine form, and also a bit of a change from some of his more popular books (Blood Crazy in particular comes to mind). It is firmly in the haunted house corner of the horror genre, but takes a bit of a twist: in this case the house itself is the evil menace at the heart of the story. I read this a couple months ago so I'll be a bit briefer in my recollection of the details, but I did enjoy this book and felt it was worth talking about in the 31 Days of Horror-thon I have subjected myself to.
The eponymous Tower of the novel is in fact an ancient building, dating back to medieval times and possibly earlier, around which later construction was built out, enclosing the original ancient structure deep inside a much larger mansion. The mansion was an important staging ground for British air defense in World War II and in the years leading up to the time in the novel it was a retirement home for the elderly before being shut down and abandoned and turned by whoever owns the property into a rental in a remote region of England (if you live in England you can correct me on exactly where it is at), accessible only by taking a ferry and crossing a broad wetlands region.
It is to this house which an aspiring young band of musicians who have recently secured a lucrative contract decide to sequester themselves away in for a month, to compose their new album and strike their fame and fortune. The group consists of a narcissistic leader, the guy who composes the songs and brings along his two girlfriends, his drummer, guitarist, keyboard guy, and a gal whose another girlfriend I think, and whose skillset I can't recall offhand (and apologies, I don't remember anyone's names and can't be bothered to look it up right now)....each is an interesting enough character, though maybe the bandmates are all a little too similar except for the self-absorbed leader, who stands out.
As the group arrives in the small town nearby and leaves the ferry, they find themselves in a drenching storm and stumble across their first omen, an exausted stray dog on the road. One of the bandmembers takes pity on the dog and brings it into the car. This dog is an important character in the book from this point on.
Anyway, they come to this spooky house, notice it's odd architecture, and are perplexed at a clock which seems to blare from every room equally and goes off on the hour, often inconveniently while they are trying to record. They barely have a day's time to do some practice when they've had it with this clock and try to find its source....and it looks like the source may be in the weird smaller building/tower buried inside the inner building.
The first night things start happening. One of the team has an oppressive dream of the house literally closing in on him, crushing him to death, but he wakes up thinking maybe it was a dream but his chest bruise suggests otherwise. The next day things get worse, as more horrific things are imagined and one of the girls disappears on the property. There's an old groundskeeper, it turns out, and we the readers learn he is a slave to whatever entity possesses the house. Indeed, the entity may have been there a very long time, and demands sacrifice periodically. I don't think the group gets further than another day or so before they are all keenly aware they are being hunted by the house, which seems determined to stop their music and kill them.
About the biggest problem I can identify in The Tower is that over the course of reading it I began to get the feeling that Simon Clark had a good core premise for a story, and he filled in the gaps and bits as he went along. The hint of the house's ancient nature, perhaps originally the location of an ancient shrine used to appease some ancient chthonic old one beneath the earth was never more than hinted at, which is a shame, because I would have liked to see a bit more of this. We get a lot of grisly dream sequences where people witness their own deaths, then later that death confronts them in the real world and with luck they might escape it....and in the end, the dog they found at the beginning turns out to be a shockingly important key to their escape.
I was motivated to plow through the book over several days and enjoyed every minute of it. I had a vague feeling I had read it many years ago when it first came out, but my memory was so faded on that first read that I was able to enjoy it with surprises aplenty. Although I own a copy of the physical book in my library, I snagged a copy on Kindle and read that (the better to keep my original intact and uncreased; it's an old book now!) Well worth a read if you like weird house haunt tales, or if you happen to enjoy Simon Clark's writings. I am a big fan of his, and this book, like all of his works, was well worth the time.
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