House of Bones

Book excerpt: A chilling twist on the haunted-house story as five strangers resolve to spend two weeks in an abandoned, high-rise urban housing project that even gang lords and crack dealers avoid . . . Chicago’s Dreamland Housing Project was created to give people with nothing a second chance. Like so many ill-conceived dreams of its time, eventually the project fell into disrepair and disrepute, just another slum ruled by the gangs and the drug dealers. But there was one building in the complex that contained an evil far fouler than the kind running the streets. Here eerie sounds emanated nightly from the elevator shafts and the shadows at the far end of the hallways, and inexplicable, fatal “accidents” were the norm. Here human blood regularly soaked the walls and cheap carpeting as rapists and murderers ran rampant, though none could remember their dark deeds afterward. Now, decades later, Dreamland is empty of its residents and mostly demolished. But one building still stands, thanks to billionaire Ramsey Lomax, who won’t let the city raze the last and most notorious tower until he is done with it. Along with four willing strangers—a writer, an ex-cop, a doctor, and a psychic, each with a reason for participating—Lomax intends to spend two weeks living in the abandoned tower to see if the legends are real. But nothing can prepare these five for the terror they encounter once the front door slams behind them, trapping them all inside. Because in Dreamland, every nightmare comes true.