Finished Tu 5/17/11
THE BIRTHING HOUSE is an attempt at, 'The Haunted House' genre of fiction, however, there are serious flaws in the execution of Ransom's tale.
Conrad Harrison receives an inheritance from the death of his father, and he buys an ancient Victorian farm house in the small and isolated village of Black Earth, Wisconsin. Conrad had been working part-time in a Los Angeles book store, and living with his much more successful wife, Joanna, and he impulsively buys this mysterious old house as a New Beginning for their lives.
A very odd thing to do, but this is Conrad Harrison at his best, and things only spiral downward from this point. However, once he and Joanna arrive in Black Earth, strange and deadly things begin to occur.
I think that the best way to read this novel is to assume that the protagonist, Conrad Harrison, is an 'Unreliable Narrator'. And, the reader must not believe Conrad because of his rapidly deteriorating mental condition. The last forty pages of the novel are very hard to understand, and I still do not comprehend exactly what went on in the house many, many years ago. If you try to perceive this mystery from the clues which Ransom has offered, you will probably throw the book across the room in disgust. But, if you view THE BIRTHING HOUSE as a record of one man's descent into madness, you will at least complete the novel with a small degree of satisfaction.
All the members of my book club, and most of the posts on Amazon agreed that this novel was a very flawed and confused jumble of fairly interesting ideas which ultimately went nowhere.
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