With Gethsemane Hall, Winnipeg writer David Annandale has created that rarest of books: a genuinely chilling horror novel. And a fresh take on the hoary old haunted house novel, no less.

Following the death of his wife and daughter, philanthropist Richard Gray returns to his ancestral family home, the titular Gethsemane Hall. The rambling house, nestled in the British countryside near the village of Roseminster, was the home of Saint Rose the Evangelist, and has long been thought touched by spiritual forces. When a CIA agent kills himself on the grounds, a group of disparate people converges on the house, some seeking to debunk the stories, others to celebrate the spiritual presence. What they find, however, is the stuff of nightmares. Literally.

Annandale exhibits traits essential for any good horror writer: a twisted imagination, a facility for vivid description, and a strong command of pace. Gethsemane Hall is a slowly tightening noose of a novel, the carefully measured tension beginning with the pedestrian stuff of bad dreams and mysterious sounds in the dark, and building steadily until finally exploding in an imaginative Grand Guignol release. There are scenes of explicit, squishy violence, but Annandale knows when to let the reader catch her breath – but only for a moment. The underlying mythos – slowly, tantalizingly revealed – is well imagined, original, and genuinely disturbing: it rubs up against the Lovecraftian before veering someplace altogether darker.

That being said, Gethsemane Hall isn’t a perfect book. Many of the supporting characters are stock types with pencilled-in backstories, but they’re mostly a means to an end. Readers who think “cannon fodder” as the group of skeptics and believers is introduced will feel vindicated when the bodies start
to pile up.

That’s a fairly minor issue, and one most readers will cease caring about once the story gets going. There is much here to savour, and the darkness of the novel – the existential, creeping dread – lingers in its aftermath.