Mr. Splitfoot (1968)

Blurb:

My review:

Mr. Splitfoot is a name given to the Devil in the mountainous regions of New England, where Dr. Willing and his wife find shelter when their car breaks down.  The novel’s theme is the balance between rationality and savagery, science and superstition.  Thus a mysterious death in a supposedly haunted room where others have died before occurs during an experiment to lay the ghost—or, rather, not lay a ghost “because there are no ghosts, except in the minds of the living”; and the house possesses a poltergeist.  Unfortunately, children are irritatingly used, particularly in the device of the letter and the children’s plans to solve the crime.  The reader should spot the murderer quite easily; the poltergeist business is as disappointing as Rawson; and numerous plot holes are unresolved at the end.

To the Bibliography.

To the Helen McCloy Page.

To the Grandest Game in the World.

E-mail.