No Doors, No Windows

By Joe Schreiber
Del Rey, $14.00, 288 pages

Small town secrets, an eerie house, and an unfinished manuscript form some of the support structures in Joe Schreiber’s haunted house novel No Doors, No Windows. It is also a story about a writer, Scott Mast, who returns to his hometown in New Hampshire to attend his father’s funeral.  Scott initially stays with his brother Owen, who is the lone parent of Henry, Scott’s nephew. Owen never recovered fully from the death of his and Scott’s mother a decade ago and has succumbed to alcoholism. This is only the tip of the iceberg’s darkness, because Scott, a writer himself, finds a manuscript revealing dark deeds, on which his father was working.

Scott returns to skeletons in the closet, people whom he left behind when he moved to Seattle and gave little consideration to in the intervening years.  These include an old girlfriend, a town-wide tragedy, the town’s most popular girl, and Round House – a dark house not far from where Scott’s father crashed his car and died. 

On one level, No Doors, No Windows is very much a haunted house story.  Scott soon finds himself spending a great deal of time in Round House trying to finish the creepy manuscript on which his father was working. He soon wonders if the dark events relayed in the unfinished manuscript actually occurred in Round House.

Some of the conventions in the novel are familiar – the darkness surrounding the “present” of the novel is informed by events generations removed from the protagonist and a haunted writer struggling with his craft have been done on more than one occasion by Stephen King and recently to great effect by Caitlín R. Kiernan in The Red Tree. However, Schreiber terrifically takes the familiar elements and molds them into his own satisfying vision of darkness. 

Schreiber’s style might be considered sparse and natural. Characters who have known each other don’t immediately unfold their histories when they come together; there are no paragraphs and/or pages of exposition. Characters simply act as themselves and speak without regard for the reader’s foreknowledge of these characters.  In this respect, Schreiber paints a very realistic picture of how these people would interact. No Doors, No Windows is a taut and emotional ghost story, the root of whose hauntings are revealed carefully and deftly.  Schreiber has written a precise, solid and engaging novel that pulls no punches and is recommended.

Reviewed by Rob Bedford