Need help identifying this scifi/horror novel

Cafe Society
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A few years ago I found a paperback in a hospital waiting room and started reading it to take my mind off the situation at hand. Under the circumstances, I wasn’t paying too close attention to the book, and ever since I’ve wondered just what it was that I was reading. Can any Dopers help?

The book appeared to be fairly newly-published (this was in 2000) but it was written in a sort of late Victorian style. It had the feel of someone trying to imitate M.R. James. The plot centered around a guy who goes to visit a wealthy college friend of his at a large country estate. While there, he learns about a nearby house that’s been abandoned for some time which has recently been purchased by a mysterious family, and his host is very eager to lear more about his new neighbors. The nearby village, meanwhile, is filled with the usual canny stock characters and there are many allusions to The Unspeakable Event What Happened Nigh on 20 Year Ago, of which the villagers Do Not Speak, this event related somehow to the newly-purchased house.

So: cue drawn-out after dinner discussions between narrator and host over snifters of brandy. All very standard, until the book takes this bizarre detour into surreality, where the narrator & his host discover an ancient well in a cave which used to be guarded by a prehistoric bear (!?) who is now deceased. This well is obviously somehow EEE-VIL, and may be connected with The Unspeakable Event What Happened Nigh On 20 Year Ago and the new neighbors.

Then some monks who have something to do with the well turn up, and something odd happens to the new neighbors. This is where I stopped reading. The only other clues I can remember about the book is that the landscape and culture were described as being distinctly English, yet the local fauna is all late-Pleistocene mammals. And the host has some sort of giant dangerous bird he uses to spy on the neighbors which badly frightens the narrator.

I’ve searched bookstores and online trying to find this strange book. I didn’t even really like it, I’ve just become weirdly obsessed with trying to find out what it is. If anyone knows, I’d really appreciate it. How does it all turn out?

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It turns out that the neighbours are EEE-VIL, and intend to release even worse EEE-VIL on the world. The monks may or may not be EEE-VIL. The EEE-VIL almost triumphs (probably with even more Unspeakable Events), but the host sacrifices himself to defeat the EEE-VIL (for now), and the narrator barely escapes to tell the tale. :stuck_out_tongue:

It sounds like fun! If you get an answer, I might have to go looking for it.

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Sounds like The House in the High Wood by Jeffrey E. Barlough.

I read the first book Dark Sleeper, which was enjoyable enough. I actually read that book so I could read the House book, but I never got around to the second one. It was that “Dickens mixed with Lovecraft” quote that intrigued me.

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Given ratty’s precis, that sounds like an apt characterization.

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Yes! I followed your link, it’s the same book. Thank you so much, Mofo Rising. Care to spoil the first book for me? May help with the prehistoric well-guarding bear mystery.

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Ratty, I have Dark Sleeper in my donate-to-the-library pile.

I don’t want to spoil it for you, except that it’s a mystery of sorts, and it has wooly mammoths being used as pack animals. I liked it and I’m glad to hear that it looks like Barlough is writing other books set in that milieu.

I’d be happy to send it to you rather than the library. E-mail me with your address if you’d like to have it. It’s a trade pb with a remainder mark, nothing special.

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Thanks, AuntiePam! Check your e-mail. :slight_smile: