Book Review; The Castle of Los Angeles by Lisa Morton

Posted by Peter Schwotzer in Books, Reviews, Terror Tales with Peter D. Schwotzer on March 8th, 2010

“Theatre director Beth Ortiz is the newest resident of The Castle, an exclusive Los Angeles artists’ community. Anxious actors aren’t all Beth has to worry about in her new space, however, for The Castle has a secret history of madness and murder, and a celebrity artist who develops a strange fixation on Beth.

And The Castle also happens to be haunted.

By some particularly uneasy spirits.”

Lisa Morton is probably best known for her short fiction (she won the Bram Stoker Award for short fiction in 2006) and for her non-fiction (she won the Bram Stoker Award for Non-Fiction in 2008 for A Hallowe’en Anthology: Literary and Historical Writings Over the Centuries). She is also a screenwriter and was editor for the anthology Midnight Walk which I reviewed at the link.

Castle of Los Angeles is a genuinely creepy story about The Castle, an artist’s community and theater in LA. Beth Ortiz moves into to take over the theater company and soon finds out that it is supposedly haunted.

Lisa fills her story with diverse characters; a genius artist that dabbles in the occult, prostitutes that are steadily disappearing one by one and other artists and talent behind the scenes of a theater company. I found the characters wonderfully written and believable, I could make an emotional connection with them and that is what always makes a great book as far as I am concerned.

The story also has a few nice twists and turns that will pleasantly surprise you. No spoilers from me though, buy the book.

My favorite part of the story besides the chills it provided was the detail she provides on the behind the scenes working of a play. I have been to a few plays in my life and never really thought about all the work that is needed behind the scenes to successfully pull it off.

Haunted places and ghost stories are some of my most favorite reads and Castle of Los Angeles ranks up with there with some of my all time favorites like Ghost Story and The Shining.

If you are looking for a well written, page turner of a ghost story you would be hard pressed to find anything published in the last few years as good as this.

Visit Lisa at her website www.lisamorton.com.

You can purchase the book at Gray Friar Press or at Amazon.com