Len Handeland’s The Haunting of Wellsley Manor is a gothic horror novel that follows William Martens, a young man seeking to escape the dead-end monotony of his hometown by attending Cornell University. But his aspirations are soon entangled in a series of ghostly encounters at his grandfather’s decaying estate in Ithaca. As he settles into his new life, William is haunted—literally and emotionally—by family secrets, unresolved trauma, and spectral figures that begin to cross the veil between the living and the dead. The deeper he digs into the house’s eerie history, the more he realizes that some legacies come with strings attached and blood on their hands.

I was drawn in from the very beginning. The dialogue felt natural and raw—sometimes even painfully real, especially during the tense moments between William and his bitter, emotionally distant father. There’s something incredibly satisfying about a story that doesn’t rush. The buildup is slow and deliberate, and that pacing works here. It lets you soak in the atmosphere—the creaking floors, the dusty corridors, the strained silences. The house itself becomes a character, and not just a spooky backdrop. What Handeland nails is the eerie tension between generational pride and inherited guilt. His prose has this honest, almost nostalgic warmth when depicting William’s relationship with his grandfather, Isaiah. Those moments hit me hard.

Sometimes the writing dipped into the overly descriptive, and while the story’s emotional arcs were compelling, the scares occasionally felt more atmospheric than truly chilling. I didn’t mind that too much—this is more The Sixth Sense than The Conjuring—but readers expecting non-stop frights may be left wanting. Still, the dream sequences and ghostly children were deeply unsettling in a quiet and lingering way. The mirror scenes especially gave me the kind of slow-building dread I love in horror fiction.

I’d recommend The Haunting of Wellsley Manor to anyone who enjoys a slower burn and emotionally rich storytelling. It’s a ghost story wrapped in a coming-of-age tale, laced with regret and second chances. If you liked The Others or even older Stephen King novels like Bag of Bones, you’ll probably enjoy this. It’s not just about ghosts. It’s about how the past clings to us, follows us, and sometimes, if we’re not careful, swallows us whole.

Pages: 236 | ASIN : B0DTBZNRV9