To Seek Where Shadows Are
Miriam Benedict | Avon Books | 1973 | 158 pages
“Laurie, I know you’ll think me a damn fool. But the minute I walked into this place, I felt a—what can I call it?—an enveloping horror.”
Laurie moves into a newly rented apartment in an old Gothic apartment building on Riverside Drive. Watched over by stone gargoyles from the parapet, the building is a lone throwback to an earlier age, now entirely surrounded by new high rises. Her bohemian painter friend Alex, who has a studio in the building, recommended the apartment to Laurie and her fiancé Steve, who plans on joining her from his student housing at Columbia. However, immediately after crossing the threshold, Steve is overcome with an overpowering dread that causes him not only to back out of moving in with Laurie, but prompts him to break off their engagement entirely.
Having surrendered her old apartment, Laurie has little choice but move in to her new digs. Although previously unoccupied for many years, she discovers old paints and a portrait of a woman in the old cupboards off the living room. Intending to donate the paints to Alex, Laurie is puzzled to learn that the tubes are dry and brittle to him, but for her the pigments flow fresh and smoothly in her hands. Unable to sleep in her new space, she is troubled by eerie visions of a painter and his model, while another figure beckons to her from beside her own sleeping form.
More of a moody character piece that an outright Gothic horror, the specter of the past looms darkly for Laurie, as she lives out the tragic lives of past occupants through her ever increasing visions. The house on Riverside Drive seemingly traps its current residents in a dance of prescribed events, releasing its pent-up psychic energies in a form of karmic purging. Laurie never reaches much beyond a passive state, watching and waiting for her creepy carnival ride to end.
ruined head 