The unseen

by Alexandra Sokoloff

Paper Book, 2009

Status

Available

Call number

813/.6

Genres

Horror

All Topics

Fiction

Publication

New York : St. Martin's Press, 2009.

Description

After experiencing a precognitive dream that shatters her engagement and changes her life forever, young California psychology professor Laurel MacDonald decides to get a fresh start by taking a job at Duke University in North Carolina. She soon becomes obsessed with the long-buried files from the world-famous Rhine parapsychology experiments, which attempted to prove if ESP really exists. Along with another charismatic professor, she uncovers disturbing reports, including a mysterious case of a house supposedly haunted by a poltergeist, investigated by another research team in 1965. The two professors and two exceptionally gifted Duke students move into the grand, abandoned mansion to replicate the investigation, unaware that the entire original team ended up insane...or dead.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member SandyLee

Laurel MacDonald has moved from California to North Carolina to put distance between her and her cheating fiancee. She takes a teaching job at Duke University in NC. Laurel has some paranormal occurrences in her own life and family so information on the Rhine Research Center intrigues her,

especially when she finds out their research was shut down after a certain experiment. I was hoping for a little more woo woo when the group decides to stay at the house which precipitated the shut down, maybe an actual ghost that could be seen. But this was more "Blair Witch" in that perhaps the author felt it was more intriguing to keep those aspects in the reader's imagination.

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LibraryThing member silenceiseverything

I've been wavering between three or four stars with The Unseen. I've read Alexandra Sokoloff's previous work. I thought The Harrowing was great and I absolutely loved The Price. But something about The Unseen made it not as captivating as the other two.

I love haunted house stories. Always have.

There's just so much build up in them and most of the time, it delivers. That was one of my problems with The Unseen. Firstly, it took a long while for anything remotely creepy to happen. Usually I don't mind it since it sets the mood up earlier. But this didn't happen. While it took about a hundred pages for anything to get going, I felt that while the author was building up the characters, the mood just wasn't being set up. There was no eerie sense of foreboding in the first hundred pages.

But when things start to get going, they really got going. The last hundred pages were very intense, though, it wasn't exactly creepy nor scary. Just a bit thrilling. The premise was very intriguing, though. And while I wasn't particularly scared, I was interested enough to keep reading the book. It just fell a little bit flat to me. I would recommend her other books, The Harrowing and The Price, slightly more than this one.

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LibraryThing member KerriL

It took a while to get into this book, and I never really bonded with the characters...to the extent that I frequently forgot the main character's name while reading. There were several storylines that were started and never finished. A lot of loose ends were left, in my opinion. However, the last

quarter of the book was great; fast paced, suspenseful, and creepy.

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LibraryThing member ct.bergeron

I loved the book, creepy enough, I felt chills as I was reading it.
Laurel Macdonald is a psychologist who just experience ESP. In an effort to understand what happens to her. And in the process of starting a new life. She starts researching the experiment of the Rhine Laboratory of the Duke

university, which trived for 38 years, to finally close for unknown reason.
With a colleague of hers, she decides to reproduce the last experiment of the Rhine laboratory, without knowing what happenend in the end.

This is my first book of Alexandra Sokoloff, I wasn't sure I'd like it after reading reviews that this wasn't her best work. But since I had nothing to compare it with. I just got caught in the story and devoured the book very quickly!

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LibraryThing member dukefan86

I usually enjoy books with a North Carolina setting, and this book was no exception. The fact that much of it was set in Durham and on the Duke campus (partly in Perkins, to boot!) was an added bonus. I thought the book was suspenseful, though the very end was a bit of a letdown. Still, a very good

summer read.

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LibraryThing member castironskillet

I actually really enjoyed this book. It is exactly the kind of story I like with plenty of ghost and/or paranormal doings. The characters were good and the dialogue was real sounding. I liked that half the book took place in the haunted house, but that the whole book didn't. I enjoyed how the

author doled out bits of the back story. The atmosphere of the campus and the library was particularly well done. My biggest complaint with the book, and it is a big one, is the ending. It didn't tie it up well at all. I wanted to hear the complete back story of the house and the siblings, I wanted to know exactly what happened with the experiment in 1965. The end was a huge let down.

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LibraryThing member coloradogirl14

I'm a ghost story junkie with high expectations, so I was a little surprised not only to discover how much I adored this book, but how I had gone for so long without hearing about Alexandra Sokoloff in the first place.

My immediate impression was that this book updated Shirley Jackson's The Haunting

of Hill House for a modern audience. Laurel, the protagonist, is still reeling from a sudden break-up with her fiance and is struggling to fit in as a psychology professor at Duke University. After a short time, she stumbles across hundreds of research materials from the now-defunct Rhine Parapsychology Lab, which operated out of Duke University in the 1960's and was suddenly dismantled in 1965. The more Laurel investigates the events around the lab's final experiment in 1965, the more she realizes that something very unsettling happened, with everything centered around the mysterious Folger House - a sprawling, off-kilter mansion that seems as though it was spawned by Jackson's Hill House. With the assistance of her colleague, Brandon, and two psychically gifted college students, the four of them rent out the Folger House and investigate the supposed poltergeist phenomenon in the house. The reigning theory is that poltergeist infestations are a direct result of human psychic energy, but the more time Laurel spends in the house, the more she believes that something more supernatural and ominous is at work here.

I don't usually spend this much time on plot summary, but this really illustrates why I loved the book so much. The scientific study of ghosts and paranormal phenomenon is a fairly common theme in horror culture, but it doesn't always ring true. I loved that this book and the experiment described inside were actually based on historical events - the Rhine Parapsychology Lab was an actual organization operating out of Duke University, and they attempted to scientifically quantify psychic abilities in participants. This made the story seem much more realistic.

But inside the Folger House, there is something much more insidious roaming the halls, and the house itself actually becomes the antagonist. I love, love, love stories that can personify a house and turn it into a malevolent force, and this book hit all the right notes. If I compared this book to a horror movie, I'd say it's a good blend between The Haunting and Poltergeist.

This was a slower, more measured kind of horror, since the investigative team doesn't even reach the Folger House until two-thirds into the book. But by the time the house starts manifesting, you'll be hard pressed to put this book down.

This is a great option for readers who like unease and suspense more than outright terror, or who prefer bloodless horror stories.

Recommended for fans of: ghost stories, horror with a more measured pace, suspenseful but not terrifying stories.

Readalikes: I've already mentioned The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson as a good readalike, but here are a few others with a slower and more subtle build-up of horror.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill. This short novel has all the touches of a classic English ghost story - misty moors, an abandoned mansion, a superstitious small town, and a vengeful ghost. The slow, atmospheric buildup makes this a good reading suggestion for people who don't consider themselves horror fans!

The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters. A doctor has been summoned to Hundreds Hall to care for a patient, but when he arrives, he finds himself tangled up in the lives of the Ayres family members, as well as the supernatural presence in the home. This story straddles the line between horror and literary suspense, but fans of The Unseen will likely appreciate the slow build-up of suspense and the subtle supernatural elements.

The Turn of the Screw - Henry James. A governess has been hired to care for two orphans living with their uncle in a remote country estate. The governess is soon disturbed by what she thinks are the ghosts of two evil servants who used to work in the house, but are they really ghosts, or just a figment of her imagination?

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LibraryThing member DeltaQueen50

Ghost stories must be very difficult to write. The author must tread a fine line to make his story both believable and atmospheric. Most stories fail in some way or another, but the very few that succeed make the hunt for a good one worthwhile.

The Unseen by Alexandra Sokoloff started slowly as main

character, Lauren, a psychology professor abandons her life in California and moves to North Carolina, taking up a position at Duke University. The catalyst for the abrupt changes she has made in her life was a precognitive dream that she is still having. Wanting to know more about parapsychology, she and handsome Professor Brady form a small study group to replicate a study that was conducted at an old mansion in 1965. There are few records about this experiment as something went terribly wrong and the whole program was shut down and the records were sealed until just recently.

The premise took awhile to set up, but then the story did pick up in the middle of the book and once the study group moved into the old house, the atmosphere turned dark and spooky. Unfortunately the characters were rather one dimensional and the conflict between them was a little overdone. As the book continued I eventually got rather annoyed as the characters got sillier and the story seemed to break down in a meaningless muddle. Unfortunately The Unseen was just another mediocre ghost story.

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LibraryThing member sturlington

Newly arrived at Duke University, a psychiatry professor becomes interested in the files of the world-famous parapsychology lab, which was abruptly shut down 40 years ago following a mysterious experiment. She decides to investigate and ends up helping to re-create the experiment in a strange house

in the rural North Carolina pine country, which unleashes a ghost or evil spirit or madness or something.

Not enough scares and took too long to get going. The paranormal investigators only just arrive at the haunted house halfway through the house. There is also a romance angle that I felt detracted from the story. We never did find out who Laurel had hot sex with in that kind of disgusting 'it's rape but it's a dream and anyway I like it' scene. The house itself was cool, but the suspense failed to build, and the ending was muddled and anti-climactic. Not a great example of the haunted house genre, although not terrible either -- just forgettable. I mainly kept reading because of the North Carolina angle.

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LibraryThing member JessicaReadsThings

Oh, goodness. I really did not like this one. Okay start with the good: short, compelling chapters; atmosphere; and quite the exciting climax.

The not so good: details, a lot of nitpicky details. I believe that this is meant to be a sort of "Southern Gothic" tale. And if you're going to write about

the South and you don't live there, you had better do some research. I had trouble from the get go with the main character. She has no backbone (or very little of one), she's intimidated by her students, she gets completely steamrolled by the male faculty, and somehow she's on Duke's faculty without a research project? Please.

And then there are the botanical details. The leaves changing on the trees magically overnight I can forgive, especially if you are as unobservant as this character seems to be. The roses peeking through the brambles in what must be late fall, I can even forgive, because fine they might be blooming still if there hasn't been a frost. But smelling honeysuckle after the leaves have started turning. No, I'm sorry, no.

These, like I said, are nitpicky. But it is these things that take me out of the world of the story. Add to that the fact that even the Southern characters don't feel Southern. They feel like someone's idea of Southern. And, for me, it comes off as unauthentic. From the first crack about that "regional standard," "sugary concoction" (sweet tea) to the night blooming jasmine (mentioned so many times it is almost a character) to the oh-so-caricatured Southern Belle batting her eyelashes all over the place (nicknamed "Miss White Sugar"; perhaps Miss Priss was too cliché), I just wasn't into it. Sorry.

Oh and PS, apparently schizophrenia smells like urine and goats, according to this story. So, there's that.

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