Riverhouse

By: G. Norman Lippert

Narrated by: Doug Lee

When painter Shane Bellamy attempts to relaunch his life by moving into a remote summer cottage on the Missouri river, he becomes enthralled by the property's original owners, famed depression-era artist Gustav Wilhelm, and his wife, Marlena; painting their long-dead secrets of betrayal and revenge in a series of increasingly bizarre works, Shane finds that he has not only recreated their dark story on canvas, but he has brought it dreadfully back to life all around him.

Visit the official website: www.riverhousebook.com.

In the wake of his divorce and the loss of his New York art job, Shane is bereft and directionless. The cottage provides the perfect escape: small, picturesque, and lonely. There, he becomes fascinated with the history of the cottage, and that of its larger sister property, the Riverhouse, now demolished.

Shane embarks on an unusual painting project: recreating the Riverhouse on canvas, as it might have looked when it was first built. As the painting develops, surprising Shane both with its style and its strange, silent strength, he finds that the image is a sort of portal, inviting him into the Riverhouse's past. He learns of its owners, portrait artist Gustav Wilhelm, known for his arrogance as much as his genius, and of Wilhelm's wife, the beautiful but ignored Marlena. Their story blooms in Shane's mind like a dark rose, full of deepening mystery and harrowing secrets.

Gradually, Shane comes to realize that the decades' old drama isn't yet finished. Ghosts haunt the cottage, particularly the intriguing Marlena, and Shane finds himself inexplicably drawn to her, despite her otherworldly hatred of his tentative new love, art agent Christiana.

Eventually, Shane finds himself caught in the spiraling collision course of his own life and that of the Riverhouse, which has secretly risen from its dead foundation. He knows he should escape and yet he cannot seem to walk away. After all, he thinks, ghosts can't harm the living. Can they?

©2010 George Norman Lippert (P)2016 George Norman Lippert

Pretty Mediocre

This book was very long. It had a lot that didn’t need to be said. I listened to it while at work and there were times I walked away and came back a few minutes later and was not lost. The performance was kind of meh. Not that the narrator had a bad voice, it was just not the voice to go with this story, in my opinion. His voice was a little too high pitched and happy for the type of vibe that this book should have had. It was more in the tone of the guy from the Smucker’s commercials...you know, the one that said “With a name like Smucker’s it has to be good”... Not something that should be telling a creepy story. The story was just kind of bland too. Not bad but not great either.

Crazy is catching...

I'm writing this as I'm still in shock. I have chills down my arms of happiness, fear, relief, and excitement all in one balled up feeling after binging the last few hours of this book in audio format. The Riverhouse is an indescribably intriguing and entrancing story. I don't want to describe anything more except to say that "on the edge of your seat" does not even cut it. I was on my tiptoes stretched across a railing about to fall off into the depths beyond the fog as I sought the answers to all the mysteries intertwined in this plot - and in the end, they were all deliciously revealed. The cliff edges, the borderlands, the veil between what is real, what is unreal, what is sane and what is insane, and what is yet undefinable is traversed freely in this masterful story. Read it.

utterly bored by Chapter 15

I returned this book because halfway through I was completely bored with the story. The narrator was "okay" though he seemed to have some pronunciation and enunciation issues.
Overall I just simply didn't care about the story, or the characters enough to finish it, and found myself getting almost irritated with the tedium of the story and sub plots.
There had been some sense of creepiness early on, but By chapter 15, there was no atmosphere left in the story (possibly due to the narration? ),
I like a good ghost story, but with no atmosphere or even sense of mystery in the narration it becomes mundane to listen.