Book 1 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! As is now default for me, my link to the book is through my bookshop dot org affiliate account.

I seem to be on a bit of a haunted house kick lately, as the last book I blogged for 2025, A Haunting on the Hill, and the book I’ll blog about today, Twelve Nights at Rotter House (2019) by J.W. Ocker, are both very classic setup haunted house books! In fact, I bought them both on the same bookstore trip.

Twelve Nights at Rotter House, however, is distinct in the sense that the narrator of the book has deliberately opted to make his stay in a haunted house as much like a classic haunted house book!

Felix Allsey is a travel writer whose specialty is books on creepy destinations. He has achieved a small amount of success but his career hasn’t really taken off like he’d hoped he would, so he aims for his next project to be the ultimate real-life haunted house story! He chooses the 19th century Rotterdam Mansion, known as Rotter House, as his topic, an edifice that legend holds has had as many horrible deaths within it as rooms. He arranges an extended stay within the mansion with its current owner, and plans to keep himself isolated in the house, with no contact with the outside world, for 13 days straight. He won’t even set foot outside. He won’t have a phone to use, and the house has no electricity, so it will be him, a bag of snacks, and a few pieces of portable electronics to get by.

Felix’s plan is to deliberately provoke as many haunted house tropes as he possibly can during his stay, and he can’t do it alone. He invites his oldest friend Thomas, a believer in the supernatural, to join him, even though they had a falling out a year earlier and hadn’t really spoken since.

At first, their stay is completely mundane, punctuated more by disagreements than supernatural phenomena. But then unexplained events start to pile up and escalate, and it begins to feel like the house is building towards something. What was originally going to be a book about staying in a supposedly haunted house transitions into documenting the haunting itself. But even though both men know that there is no historically documented harm from a ghost, they start to wonder if they might be the first…

Twelve Nights at Rotter House is a fun, fast-paced book, with chapters divided into the twelve days stayed at the house. (You will note that Felix’s plan was to stay 13 days, so you get some foreshadowing right from the beginning.) The house and its history is fun and macabre, with each bedroom labeled by Felix using the alleged type of death that happened within it. The history of the titular builder of the house is also given in imaginative detail, as is a piece of memorabilia from that builder that Felix brings along to spur the spirits.

The biggest charm of the book, however, is its meta discussion of horror fiction and its tropes. Felix and Thomas are both horror afficionados, and their discussions of both fictional and real life horror stories and their implications for their own predicament is a constant enjoyment. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and the original movie version, The Haunting, both get a positive mention.

One thing I’m not sure about is how satisfying I found the finale of the novel, though it is always a challenge to find a good conclusion to a haunted house. It is extremely well done and well written, I just haven’t decided if I personally enjoyed it! But the rest of the novel more than makes up for any thoughts I have on the subject.

Overall, I found Twelve Nights at Rotter House to be a great haunted house story that carried me along at a brisk pace and was exactly the right amount of fun I want from a book of this type!