FRIGHT FEST #4: The Shadow Guest - Hillary Waugh

In the 1970s there was an explosion of Gothic suspense novels mostly appearing in mass market paperbacks. You didn't have to go to a bookstore to find any of them, you could buy these book in Woolworth's, local drug stores, newsstands and train station book stalls. There were ubiquitous. To some extent they still are as I find them by the dozens at library fundraising sales, used bookstores and estate sales. The stories were even more formulaic than traditional detective novels with the exception of the addition of supernatural or quasi supernatural incidents. In the better neo-Gothics the supernatural events are genuine but in the majority of them they are always rationalized. The formula can be summed up in a quip that is attributed to Donald E. Westlake (or was it Elmore Leonard? or Mike Avallone? or who?) that goes like this: "A gothic is a book where the girl gets the house."In The Shadow Guest (1971) Hillary Waugh inverts the entire formula by first making the lead character and…