The Suffering

Brackenby House is a Victorian mansion where the rent is suspiciously cheap—because in 1876, a famed psychic and a circle of would-be occultists performed a séance there that ended in a bloodbath, with everyone in the house but one dying in inexplicable ways. Now university students Kyle Birbeck, Pete, Lance, Tad, and Cass live there, and on Halloween they decide to hold a séance of their own.

What they unleash are the five terrifying ghosts Kyle's ancestor once banished into the walls: a three-eyed Incan giant, a Hellfire Club member who bargained with the Devil, a factory hand who fell to his death, an oracle commanding drowned sailors, and a seventeenth-century executioner. One by one the spirits fasten onto the housemates, tormenting each with their deepest fears. M.J. Mars's The Suffering is a relentless haunted-house horror.