The Night Strangers

 The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian  378 pages

Summary from publisher: In a dusty corner of a basement in a rambling Victorian house in northern New Hampshire, a door has long been sealed shut with 39 six-inch-long carriage bolts. 

           
The home's new owners are Chip and Emily Linton and their twin ten-year-old daughters. Together they hope to rebuild their lives there after Chip, an airline pilot, has to ditch his 70-seat regional jet in Lake Champlain after double engine failure. Unlike the Miracle on the Hudson, however, most of the passengers aboard Flight 1611 die on impact or drown. The body count? Thirty-nine - a coincidence not lost on Chip when he discovers the number of bolts in that basement door. Meanwhile, Emily finds herself wondering about the women in this sparsely populated White Mountain village - self-proclaimed herbalists - and their interest in her fifth-grade daughters. Are the women mad? Or is it her husband, in the wake of the tragedy, whose grip on sanity has become desperately tenuous?   

And here's what I thought: I have read other books by this author that I enjoyed, and I liked this one --- although not as much as some of the others, admittedly. This is a ghost story combined with a creepy haunted-house seeming story, combined with herbal lore. The characters are interesting and I liked that sometimes, I couldn't quite tell if they were reliable narrators or not. It's clear that something is wrong with Chip, since he seems to be seeing and hearing dead people. And some of the women in the town definitely seem to be hiding something --- are they witches? Maybe just weird women? I liked some of the elements of the story, although I sometimes became a little impatient with some of the characters. And, there were some surprises here -- and I was definitely surprised by the ending and had expected something different.