Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco. For many years, I marveled at what appeared to be a genuine dearth of quality haunted house novels. There are a number of undeniable classics, such as Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror (1977), Stephen King’s The Shining (1977), Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), and Richard Matheson’s Hell House (1971), but beyond these it becomes much harder to find good examples. It turns out that there are, however, plenty of amazing haunted house tales; they’ve been lurking, just out of sight, for years, lost and largely forgotten like the houses they describe. My friends at Valancourt Books have been leading the charge in reprinting some amazing work, such as Michael McDowell’s The Elementals (1981), Jack Cady’s The Well (1980), and Archie Roy’s Devil in the Darkness (1973), the latter of which I wrote an introduction for! But my reading habits are fickle, and for some reason I put off investigating another classic released by Valancourt back in 2015, Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1973). I’ve taken a stab at classifying haunted house stories before, particularly in the way they end, as there appear to be only so many ways that events can play out (though the joy is in the details which lead to that end). Burnt Offerings has made me rethink and add to the classification. One type of story is what we could call the “hostile house” story. A house which is simply hostile to anyone who tries to live inside of it, and inevitably chases out those who are within. The Amityville Horror and The Elementals are stories like this. A second class of story is the “house with a secret.” The haunting is the result of some horrible event that has cast its shadow on the premises. In the end, the secret is revealed — which may or may not end the evil. Devil in the Darkness and Hell House are stories of this form. Burnt Offerings made me realize that there is a third distinct class of story: the “hungry house.” A house that actively seeks victims to consume. The Haunting of Hill House and The Shining are exemplary examples of this form, but somehow it never really clicked with me until I read Burnt Offerings . The novel features the Rolfe family, Ben and Marian and their son David. Living in a stifling apartment in Queens, they decide to get away for the summer to a home in the country. Browsing through the newspaper, Marian finds an offer that seems too good to possibly be true: an entire mansion for rent in upstate New York for the entire season, for a ridiculously good price. The only catch given by the Allardyce family renting the home: the renters must leave food for the elderly senior Mrs. Allardyce, who stays secluded in her room in a remote wing, behind an intricately carved door. Though Ben is suspicious, Marian convinces him that the deal is too good to pass up, and they move in. And at first, it seems like it will be the perfect summer. Marian takes care of leaving food for Mrs. Allardyce and picking up the dishes, while Ben works on prepping his school syllabus for the next semester and David enjoys the pool and the extensive mansion grounds. But as the season progresses, uncertainty sets in and unsettling events begin to happen. Marian finds herself increasingly obsessed with the house, and Ben finds himself seeing things that cannot possibly exist. The mansion itself seems to be changing the longer they live there. And, through it all, none of them ever see Mrs. Allardyce in person; she remains hidden in her room, behind the curiously carved door. What is happening to the house, and to them? And what does the Allardyce family want with them in the end? And will they survive it? Burnt Offerings is a rather unconventional haunted house story. You won’t find the typical ghosts or demons here, and the haunting is rather subtle… until the very end. This is a very good horror novel, as can be seen just from the influence it had on the field. It was evidently an inspiration for Stephen King’s The Shining , and it was itself made into a movie in 1976 which was itself positively reviewed (though I have yet to see it). Personally, I would say it is not my favorite haunted house novel of all time, but it is undeniably strange and effective and worth reading by anyone interested in the subject, or the history of horror. It was, sadly, only one of two novels written by Robert Marasco, and evidently his only horror novel. It was not his only fiction with dark subject matter, however, as he also wrote the play Child’s Play , which was first performed in 1970 and focuses on strife and violence at a Roman Catholic boarding school. It was also adapted into a movie, which was released in 1972. It is difficult to convey the cleverness and the horror of Burnt Offerings without giving too much away; you’ll just have to read it for yourself to find out what secrets and motivations the Allardyce home holds… PS I forgot to mention that the “hungry house” concept came from reading the introduction to the new edition, written by Stephen Graham Jones! Tor.com. Science fiction. Fantasy. The universe. And related subjects. Forgotten Bestsellers: Burnt Offerings. Today’s bestsellers are tomorrow’s remainders and Forgotten Bestsellers will run for the next four weeks as a reminder that we were once all in a lather over books that people barely even remember anymore. Have we forgotten great works of literature? Or were these books never more than literary mayflies in the first place? What better time of year than the holiday season for us to remember that all flesh is dust and everything must die? The Seventies! High inflation! Rising unemployment! The Oil Crisis! Spiking energy prices! The Recession! Desegregation of Schools! Which led to white flight! High crime! The Son of Sam! Everyone was worried about money! Which is why the Seventies were the decade when the haunted house novel thrived. There was The Sentinel (’74) about a model who moves into a new house…from hell. There was The Shining (’77) about an economically strapped family that took a last chance job in a hotel…from hell. There was The Amityville Horror (’77) about an economically strapped family that got a real estate deal…from hell. There was The House Next Door (’78) about nouveau riche suburbanites who built the contemporary home…from hell. But it all started with Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (’73) about a family that escapes the city to move into the summer rental…from hell. Marasco was a high school English teacher, which meant any illusions he’d ever had about human nature had long since been stomped to death. His two contributions to American letters were Child’s Play and Burnt Offerings . The first was a play about a war of wills between two high school teachers that involves self-mutilation, blindings, impromptu crucifixions, rumors of demonic possession, and a couple of defenestrations. Marasco said he wrote his play “to scare the hell out of everybody” and apparently it worked, running for 343 performances on Broadway. A few years later he delivered Burnt Offerings . Originally written as a screenplay, Burnt Offerings is a slender 264 pages and was originally intended to be a black comedy, but, as Marasco said in an interview “It just came out black.” Reviewers either panned it or patronized it, but it didn’t matter. The book caught on and helped spawn the wave of haunted house novels that came out later in the decade. Stephen King’s The Shining and Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror are both basically rewrites of Marasco’s book. If social and political anxiety spawns zombies, economic anxiety gives birth to haunted houses and Marasco created the now-common real estate nightmare haunted house scenario: a cash-strapped family (or individual) gets a deal on a place that’s above their socio-economic station. Hoping to make a fresh start, they go all in, and in short order realize that their attempt to buy a better life at a discount is the worst decision they ever made and all they can do is run for their lives, abandoning their investment. If there’s any doubt that Burnt Offerings is all about the square footage, the first chapter is a long lament from Marian Rolfe, trapped in their stifling Queens apartment as summer begins, her neighbors driving her bonkers as they jam the courtyard yelling to each other like a bunch of low class heathens and peeing on the mailboxes. Marian likes the finer things in life, like collecting antiques and giving her son, David, neuroses about cleanliness. Her husband, Ben, agrees to go look at a summer rental she finds, and when it turns out to be a decrepit mansion at a bargain price, he gets bullied into taking it for the summer against his better judgment. Deals like that don’t come for people like them. The house is owned by the Allardyces, a middle-aged brother and sister who are the very epitome of shabby chic Waspy eccentricity, and they have one condition: their elderly mother lives upstairs and could the Rolfe’s please leave a tray for her three times a day. Ben sees this as the giant red warning flag it is, but Marian has to have the place and she’ll agree to anything. Once they move in (along with Ben’s elderly Aunt Elizabeth) the house immediately transforms them into their own worst nightmares. Marian begins to clean obsessively, hypnotized by the house’s silver tea services and expensive, uncared for antiques. Aunt Elizabeth, a real live wire at the start of the book, becomes frail and infirm. David gets more and more timid. Ben becomes the kind of father he never wanted to be, practically raping his wife one night, and bullying David into “being a man” and nearly drowning him in the pool. But every day the house looks nicer, newer, cleaner, and brighter. The Seventies saw America’s cities crumble and middle class folks fleeing to the suburbs, and the class and racial overtones of this flight are scattered throughout Burnt Offerings . When informed that the house is for rent to “the right people,” Ben immediately responds, “Racist pigs.” Renting the Allardyce house isn’t their only option for a summer escape but Marian is repulsed by their middle class alternatives. A summer of public beaches and maybe two weeks in some upstate rental surrounded by all the other proles fleeing Queens makes her gag. She doesn’t want to climb the social ladder, she wants to skip a few rungs and go directly to Mansion. She wants elegance, privacy, and all the things the Allardyces have but don’t seem to appreciate. What Marian doesn’t realize is that she’s not the owner of this house, she’s its servant. Her summer is spent on her knees, waxing floors, dusting picture frames, repairing damage. To her, it’s an act of ownership, but as is made clear by the end, she can never escape her station. The cruel truth is that the Allardyces have money and she doesn’t and nothing will change that reality. She can live in their house, she can polish their furniture, but she’ll never belong. Most of us remember Burnt Offerings from its lugubrious 1976 movie adaptation starring a snippy Karen Black, Oliver Reed’s drifting accent, and Bette Davis fighting over the crown for Drama Queen with Burgess Meredith. A few images, like a grinning, sunglasses-wearing, cadaverous chauffeur, and its ridiculously violent shock ending have stuck in people’s minds over the years, but mostly it’s a sleepy, slow-paced haunted house movie that doesn’t do anything wrong, but doesn’t do a whole lot right, either. Which is why I was so surprised to read the book. Because it is cold-blooded. Marasco’s page-turner is vicious, not pulling a single punch as Marian runs her hands possessively over the house, letting her family alternately either die or go insane without batting an eye. “Oh, how annoying,” she seems to think as the human damage piles up around her. “I really must polish this silver.” Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson had written haunted house books before Marasco and The Haunting of Hill House (’59) and Hell House (’71) are both genre classics, but neither of them has a thing to say about money. Both books were about psychic investigators going to abandoned mansions and trying to figure out how they got so spooky, revolving around “are these ghosts real or am I insane” issues. It took Marasco and his now-forgotten bestseller to realize that the real issue for most people with a haunted house is, “Can I get my investment back, or did I just totally screw over my family?” As far as I can tell, Marasco was the first American writer to bring anxieties about class, mortgages, and equity to the forefront of the haunted house novel, paving the way for the writers who came after him. Both Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror and Stephen King’s The Shining are basically rewrites of Burnt Offerings , both of them about cash-strapped families who get deals on new places far outside what they should reasonably expect to afford and both of them coming to regret it. Because when you’re dealing with a haunted house, it doesn’t matter how much money you put into repairing that boiler or how much time you spend fixing that pool. At the end of the day, all you can do is run. Grady Hendrix has written for publications ranging from Playboy to World Literature Today and his latest novel is Horrorstör , about a haunted Ikea. Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco. There's no getting around it, and if you've read it (or seen the movie adaptation), I'd wager the most memorable aspect of Burnt Offerings (Dell Books/Mar 1974) by Robert Marasco has to be that chauffeur driving a limousine, a suave harbinger of luxurious death. One of the "four horseman" of the early 1970s horror apocalypse—you see the other three guilty parties named on this cover— Burnt Offerings is remembered only by the die-hard horror fans, but I'm not sure how beloved it is. Marasco's novel is a staid, stately, slow-burn exploration of domestic ruin; it offers the mildest of chills with the very occasional horror set-piece. It's a modified haunted-house novel; there are no ghosts, no rattling chains, but an overarching evil power nonetheless. New York City sucked in the '70s and it sucked especially in the summer back when A/C wasn't a commonplace household item. Everyone was looking to get out (a bit of a theme in vintage horror) and if you could afford it, renting a summer home was tops. Knowing she can't spend another sweltering season in their Queens apartment, Marian Rolfe finds and shows her husband Ben an ad in the paper about a countryside home to rent "for the right people," (Ben hears a dog whistle and comments racist pigs but Marian is not dissuaded). Along with their young son David in tow, they drive the couple hours upstate, out of the city, and find a home, a mansion, an estate really, set back in foresty wilds. Towering above them, ballustraded and pavillioned and mullioined and multi-storeyed, it leaves the Rolfes with jaws agape. Yet on close inspection there is much wear and tear; a mortal sin , Marian thinks. Once inside—even more astonishing than outside—they meet the caretaker Walker and then the eccentric Allardyce siblings, sixty-ish, who chat and charm and finally do the hard sell: But they needn't have bothered for Marian, and they even raise the price from the unbelievably low $700 for the summer to a still-unbelievable $900. And then comes the hitch, the hitch Ben has suspected: the Allardyces' "dear darling" Mother, "a woman solid as this rock of a house." She lives in an upstairs room, locked away, and will remain so even while the Rolfes live there. All you have to do, the Allardyces explain, is leave her a meal tray three times a day. They'll never even see her. No one who rented the house in previous summers—and there have been plenty!—ever saw her either. Surely there is nothing to be concerned about? Marian can sense the greatness beneath the disarray and disuse, the greatness that she can bring out and restore over their stay. And stay they do, even inviting along Ben's old yet still lively and independent Aunt Elizabeth. Ben remains aloof from the house; an introspective, rational English teacher, he hopes to prepare for his fall courses but never seems to get around to it. For too long he cannot put his finger on the change in Marian's behavior. Marian becomes fascinated by the extensive photos of faces from Mother Allardyce's past which decorate her sitting room; Marian will sit there in a wingback chair when she delivers meals, rarely touched, to the old woman's bedroom door. That door is carved with elaborate decoration (referenced in cover art), shifting in the light, almost hypnotic. Soon Marian lies to both Ben and Aunt Elizabeth that she's actually spoken to and seen Mother, and then even begins eating her food. In distressed vain Ben watches his wife drift from him, the house assuming a larger and larger psychic area in her mind and in her life: "It is the house. As crazy as it sounds, I know it's the house." "How is that possible, Ben?" "I don't know." "If it were true, darling, if I could believe what you're saying—God, don't you think we'd leave? I'd drag us all out of here so fast. But it's a house, nothing more than a house. " So yes, as the novel begins its descent into the maelstrom, as it were, and we wonder like Marian what the deal is with Mother Allardyce, we're rather drained by all the steps we've taken to get here. We will meet her, in a way, and I found the climax— "Burn it! Burn it out of me!" —and denouement to be a satisfying, eerie conclusion, open-ended but fair play to the final line. I felt the same about Blatty and The Exorcist , but Blatty is a much more powerful, visceral writer. Ira Levin would've used this scenario to score some ironic points about the expected role of women in married life, or the perils of being a renter. Tom Tryon might not have kept Mother Allardyce hidden away, or delved deeper into the physical and psychological obsessions. But as it is, Robert Marasco has written a quiet, polite "horror" novel decidedly of its time, with barest minimum notes of blood and madness. And I mean the bare minimum. I wish he'd gone darker, deeper, with the chauffeur and the limo; it's quite a creepy concept but still feels somehow reserved. Personally I don't rate or enjoy Burnt Offerings as much as those three other works of the same era, nor as highly as similar titles like The House Next Door , The Shining , or The Elementals . When I first read it back in 1994, I was deeply unimpressed. Then again I was reading some powerhouse stuff at the time: Haunting of Hill House , Our Lady of Darkness , Grimscribe , as I recall. This reread, I found it to be more agreeable, but it is not gonna scare the bejabbers out of you, nor is it unputdownable or scarifyingly chilling—all those quoted blurbs are so much PR hot air—but it is an integral work of the pre- King horror-bestseller era. Perhaps it is subtler and more sophisticated than I'm giving it credit for and my brain muscles are just atrophied from reading too much, well, horror fiction. While not a forgotten masterpiece, Burnt Offerings is a work that can reward the patient, thorough reader, and remains in print today. You could spend your summer worse places. Burnt Offerings (1973) Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. "Burnt Offerings" is nineteen-seventies classic horror. It's not in a hurry, It's not looking for the quick spike of fear that comes from slash-and- splash action. It's a slow burn read designed to build the kind of terror that comes from extended exposure to a threat you can't name, that you may even blame yourself for and which you can't escape. Marasco takes a relatively normal domestic "What if?", adds an element of the supernatural and then unfolds events with dreadful implacability, leaving me feeling like I was watching flies struggling in the web of a spider that I hadn't yet seen. The "What if?" is: what if you had chance to have your dream house but the price was putting your marriage under strain and leaving you with no energy left over to do anything else? Would you pay the price? Would it be worth it? Could you NOT pay the price once you've started? I suspect that, if this were being converted to a movie today, there would be a rush to get the young family to the haunted house so bad things could start to happen before people lose interest. Marasco goes a different route. He makes the oppression of living in a crowded, noisy apartment block in Queens in the summer heat and humidity come alive. He gives us time to look at wife and husband and to see how they are alone and apart. This achieves two things: it makes the decisions each of them make later more believable and it lays the foundation for believing that what befalls them is, somehow, their own fault. When we finally get to the huge, remote house in up-State New York that the couple is thinking of renting for the summer, there is a strong sense of threat being masked in the same way that a spicy sauce is used to hide the tainted meat it covers. The masking is done partly by the weirdly charismatic Alerdices, who own the house but the couple themselves actively collude in not seeing anything wrong. As the reader, hearing the Alerdices say that the house will be rented to "The right people'" felt like a doom or a curse, as if they were identifying "the right people" the same way that a predator uses the barely-there-but-bound-to-get-worse lameness to mark one of the herd as prey. To me, the rental house seems a twist on the fairy tale gingerbread house: part lure, part trap. The Alerdices, brother and sister, seem at first to be the wicked witch, yet something speaks to priest or acolyte which opens the question of who or what is being worshipped. Yet the Alerdices do not force the house on this couple. The wife lusts after it, not just blind but antagonistic to any suggestion of a problem. The husband senses the taint of something rotten beneath the surface but will not stand behind his judgement. If the house is a trap then these two have chosen to ensnare themselves. This self-ensnarement provides an element of guilt that will make them distrust themselves and each other and which made me less sympathetic to them. As time goes by and various spooky, tension-inducing things happen, I found myself starting to dislike both the husband and the wife. They were never particularly engaging but I could feel the best parts of them leaching away like topsoil in a rainstorm, as they came under the influence of the house. I think the power of Marasco's writing is shown by how my perceptions as the reader where manipulated, letting me slide from being neutral about this couple at the start of the novel to experiencing a kind of grim schadenfreude-driven satisfaction at what happens to them at the end. I won't give away what happens. The ending was not a surprise but that amplified rather than reduce the level of horror. I listened to the audiobook, read by R.C Bray, who I always think of as having a "Joe Friday" voice although his range is much broader than that. He's the perfect choice for this low key but relentless horror story. ( ) I can't say enough good things about this incredible haunted house story! It was fast paced. It was chilling. It was vividly real. It was atmospheric. It was scary.It inexorably, unrelentingly pulls the reader to its final conclusion and that conclusion is stunning. This is one of the best haunted house tales I've EVER read. Perhaps it's not as literary as The Haunting of Hill House, but it makes up for that with amazing imagery punctuated with scenes of such a chilling nature that my hands actually trembled while reading them. If you're looking for a haunted house tale with an ending that doesn't disappoint, this is THE book for you. My HIGHEST recommendation! *I received a free copy of this book from Valancourt Books in exchange for an honest review. Here it is.* ( ) The Rolfe family is tired of the city. Marian and Ben Rolfe live in New York City and they are fed up with all the noise around them. They want to getaway. When Marian Rolfe finds an ad for an upstate rental house at a “reasonable price”. Marian is gung-ho about the place but Ben has his doubts but agrees that there’s no harm in checking it out. When they get to the address in the ad, they find a huge rundown mansion. Ben is convinced that the house is out of reach and wants to leave but Marian is already in love. They meet the owners, the Allerdyces, who are weirdos. They creep Ben out but when they tell them that the price is $900 for the whole summer, Ben is less creeped out. There are two conditions to the sweet price: the Allerdyces want Marian to fix up the place, which Marian probably would’ve done anyway. Also, they must, three times per day, bring a food tray to the Allerdyces’ mother whom they are going to leave in her room upstairs. It’s a totally normal thing to do and she won’t bother you at all and you likely won’t see her. The Allerdyces begin to act completely cult-like when talking about their mother calling her “Our Darling” repeatedly in a reverential tone. Ben wants to leave but Marian wants to stay, so they compromise and stay. They move in with their son, David, and Ben’s aunt, Elizabeth. Soon, the Rolfes start behaving in ways that aren’t in character. There are some rapey moments from Ben and Mirian becomes obsessed with cleaning and tending to Mrs Allerdyce. Soon their behaviour escalates and the Rolfes become increasingly distant from each other. The house is clearly influencing their behaviour and casting darkness over their relaxing summer. This is a SLOW burn of a haunted house novel. The is minimal characterisation and there are moments that feel pivotal but they are never mentioned again. Despite the slow build towards the climax, the ending itself felt rushed. I can forgive a lot of faults in a book like this, it was written in the early 70s and many things that I find cliche now was groundbreaking then. Stephen King lists this book as a main influence in The Shining and I can see that. Overall, I enjoyed this book but cannot see myself wanting to revisit this one but it definitely deserves to be read. I recommend this one to anyone that is a fan of a classic haunted house story. ( ) Robert Marasco, 62, Writer of 'Child's Play' Robert Marasco, a playwright and novelist who wrote the long-running Broadway thriller ''Child's Play,'' died on Sunday at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y. He was 62 and lived in High Falls, N.Y. He died of lung cancer, said his sister, Carole Melillo. ''Child's Play,'' an eerie melodrama about incidents of evil in a Roman Catholic boys' school, was a surprise success in 1970. Produced by David Merrick, it ran for 343 performances. Leading the cast were Fritz Weaver, Ken Howard, Pat Hingle and David Rounds. Both Mr. Weaver and Mr. Howard won Tony awards, as did Joseph Hardy for his direction and Jo Mielziner for the lighting and Gothic set design. Mr. Merrick subsequently produced the film version of the play, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring James Mason and Robert Preston. Mr. Marasco was born in the Bronx and graduated from Regis High School in Manhattan and Fordham University. He was a classical scholar and before writing the play taught Latin, Greek and English at Regis. When ''Child's Play'' was produced, he refused to reveal the name of his school because he thought that theatergoers would think the work was based on reality. It was, he said, fiction. In an interview, he said that the idea came from two sources: a newspaper clipping ''about a teacher who gave his kids some work to do and then jumped out of a classroom window'' and the film ''Torment'' (written by Ingmar Bergman), in which there was ''a sadistic Latin teacher.'' Originally titled ''The Dark,'' the play was scheduled to be directed by Harold Prince. After Mr. Prince dropped his option, Mr. Merrick signed the unknown playwright. When the author and his director met, Mr. Hardy asked him what his aim was in writing the play. Mr. Marasco said that it was to ''scare the hell out of everybody.'' Mr. Hardy said, ''You're on.'' Guided by the director, the author rewrote half the play, including the ending. In fact, there were so many changes that the production itself became a cliffhanger. The reviews, however, were generally positive. In his review in The New York Times, Clive Barnes said it was ''a wonderfully powerful melodrama that will thrill audiences for a long time to come.'' Mr. Marasco had previously written several unproduced plays. ''Child's Play'' enabled him to become a full-time writer. In 1973, he published his first novel, ''Burnt Offerings,'' about a family that rents an elegant haunted house for the summer. Reviewing it in The Times, Christopher Lehmann- Haupt said, ''It made my skin crawl, there were some pages I simply didn't want to turn, and I had a deliciously awful time.'' In 1976 the novel was turned into a Bette Davis film. Mr. Marasco also wrote the novel ''Parlor Games'' and several unproduced screenplays. Before his death, he had completed a new play, ''Our Sally.'' In addition to his sister, of Elmont, N.Y., he is survived by his father, Anthony, of Whitestone, N.Y. Mr. Marasco's success as an author of works of menace took him by surprise. He originally thought of himself as a writer of comedy. As he said about ''Burnt Offerings,'' ''I thought it would be a black comedy, but it just came out black.''