Emerson’s next series is called Night Threads.
In The Calling of the Three(1990), three young
people from our reality are brought to a typical fan-
tasy realm to help restore the rightful ruler to the
throne. The series is less inventive than Emerson’s
other fantasy work and consists of five titles ending
with The Science of Power(1996). The Art of the
Sword(1994), the strongest in the series, presents
the protagonists with a pressing problem. One of
their number has taken a poison that will eventu-
ally prove fatal unless an antidote can be found in
time.
Most of Emerson’s other novels have been tie-
ins to television programs and are of little interest,
although Questward Ho!(1999), a Xena novel, is
quite humorous. Spell Bound (1990) is a more
somber story set in a variation of early Europe in-
volving a witch’s effort to avenge her mother.
Emerson’s single best fantasy novel is The Sword
and the Lion(1993), written as Roberta Cray, a dis-
guised historical novel set in an imaginary world
that appears to be patterned after the life of
Alexander the Great, with minimal fantastic con-
tent. Fortress of Frost and Fire(1993), written with
Mercedes LACKEY, is a minor installment in
Lackey’s light-weight series about elves. Emerson
occasionally writes short fiction, often for shared
world anthologies, but has not been noticeably
successful at that length.
“The Empty House” Algernon Blackwood
(1906)
Just as ghost stories do not always involve haunted
houses, haunted house stories do not necessarily
contain a ghost in the usual sense. This classic
short story by Algernon BLACKWOODmay be the
first example of an author telling his audience that
houses can have personalities of their own, that
the dark events we might suspect are caused by the
restless spirits of former residents are actually a
manifestation of the uncanny aspects of the build-
ing itself. The narrator of this creepy tale is Short-
house, who is summoned by his Aunt Julia to
spend a night with her in an abandoned house re-
puted to be haunted. The subject of their investi-
gation is virtually identical to all the others in its
vicinity, at least in appearance, but tenants rarely
linger more than a few weeks. Also, it has an un-
specified bad reputation possibly linked to a brutal
murder that occurred therein more than a century
earlier.
Their initial foray is almost a catalog of the
devices authors would use in subsequent stories of
haunted houses. Doors close without apparent
cause, a candle is snuffed out by the application of
force rather than by a breeze, brief apparitions ap-
pear and disappear before they can be identified or
investigated, unusual noises occur in remote parts
of the building, and the two explorers feel that
their strength is being sapped on some spiritual
level, shaking their self-confidence. They are both-
ered from the very moment they step inside by
phantom coughs from an invisible throat near at
hand and are harried by them until they finally
leave. The ultimate confrontation comes when
they hear clear evidence of a ghostly reenactment
of that long-ago, savage crime as it takes place
right around them.
Haunted house stories have appeared in
droves since the early 1900s, but only a few of
them, such as THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE
(1959) by Shirley JACKSON, have been as evocative
and compact as this early thriller. Although the cli-
max feels somewhat incomplete in that we never
learn anything substantive about the long-ago
murder and the house is left unchanged when
Shorthouse and his aunt depart, the atmosphere
Blackwood evokes is one of sustained, riveting sus-
pense, and writers ever since have attempted to
mimic this early masterpiece.“Enoch”Robert Bloch(1946)
One of the standard plot devices in suspense fic-
tion (and, unfortunately, sometimes in real life as
well) is the individual who suffers from a mental
aberration in which voices speak inside the mind,
compelling the affected person to commit horrid
acts. In many stories of psychological suspense, se-
rial killers commit a series of murders at the com-
mand of this imaginary companion. Robert BLOCH
is the author of perhaps the most famous of these,
Psycho(1959), in which Norman Bates believes
that his dead mother is responsible for a series of
homicidal assaults that he himself is committing.“Enoch” 107