Thank you to Cemetery Dance Publications for a copy. After a few pages, I was absorbed in the story and wondered how the issue would be resolved. In any case, the writing is excellent, the pacing balanced and the characters very relatable.
They seemed, to me, actual people, whose faith didn’t provide for easy resolution – just a Christian family having to deal with an evil house. This combines well with the rationality they show towards the supernatural happenings in the house. True, the family thanks God a bit (too) often, but the thanks are for solid, relatable aspects of daily life, not for any privileges in the afterlife. Everything seems grounded in reality, rooted in human relationships, care, love, and compassion this is not exactly your TV version of Christianity. If you expect tons of vague spirituality, however, or stern preaching, you’ll be disappointed: there are indeed some spiritual moments, well placed in the story, and perhaps necessary, but even the emotional damage is due to past material hardships (a lot of car accidents in this novel!). There’s lots of feelings of touch in this novel, a sense of the concrete, from the possessed house (whose wood and glass are literally inhabited by the demon) to the food the family enjoys and I said I found this strange, because, to be frank, this is a Christian horror novel (as admitted by the author).
There are several disturbing scenes, some animal death (and abuse), but strangely, there’s also an emphasis on material manifestations of the horror that comes to plague the nice family moving into the house not dreams, nor visions (unless demonically induced, of course), no perverted thinking per se, but lots of material damage, corporeal death, a creepy doll that wants to cut you, not haunt you, a pastor who works on wood with his own hands, a horror writer with mostly material worries, his wife who paints, their young daughter who enjoys the world (staying in motels included). Kudos to Smith for originality (at the time of first publication.) The demon is one of the usual suspects, a prince of hell, Asmodeus, the house is an isolated beautiful mansion in a cozy, friendly town, where everyone is good natured and easy to relate to (except, of course, the young people who brought on the possession, but no worries, they get what they deserve!). It’s a complex demonic possession novel, with all the usual indications of possession, but what’s possessed is a … house. 'Something Stirs' by Thomas Smith is, by all accounts, a deceptively simple, haunted house novel: in truth, however, it’s nothing of the sort.
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