Each Halloween the Manse becomes a house of horrors. Vampires, werewolves, ghouls and ghosts stalk the premises. But the Manse's horror is more awful than the innocent Trick-or-Treaters can imagine. For its thirteenth annual House of Horrors is tonight, and it will be the last.

A woman's unsolved family history comes back to haunt her in an eerie, old, isolated manor in the Scottish Highlands. Ailsa Calder has inherited half of a house. The other half belongs to a man who disappeared from her life without a trace twenty-seven years ago—her father. Leaving London behind to settle the inheritance, Ailsa returns to her childhood home, nestled amongst the craggy peaks of the Scottish Highlands, joined by the half-sister who's almost a stranger to her. Ailsa can't escape the claustrophobic feeling that the house itself is watching her—as if her past hungers to consume her. She also can't ignore how the neighborhood animals refuse to set one foot within the gates of the garden. When the first nighttime intruder shows up and the locals in the isolated community pry into her plans for the manor, Ailsa becomes terrified that the mysteries surrounding the beautiful old home will cost her everything.

On Sunday afternoons in the late 1940s, while her husband preached at one of his three rural Prince Edward Island churches, JOAN ARCHIBALD COLBORNE wrote letters on an old portable typewriter. It made a great excuse to not to have to hear the same sermon three times, she says. I made four carbon copies on onion skin: one for his parents, one for his brother (Ed), one for my sister (Budge Wilson), and one for my parents. These charming, insightful letters detail 16 months in the life of a United Church minister's wife. Colborne joined her husband, the Reverend Blair Colborne, in Springfield West on the western end of Prince Edward Island in January 1949. The young Nova Scotian couple was ill prepared for the challenges of an isolated parish. Colborne writers humorously of her difficulties learning to cook, clean, entertain, and care for a baby in a house that seemed to be constantly in need of repair. Add to that a winter climate that played havoc with everything from the plumbing to the newlyweds' sanity, and Letters from the Manse throws open a window onto a fascinating piece of Island social history.

A novel about the life of Manson Sherill Jolly, a man who was seen as an avenging angel of the Confederacy and as a deranged renegade.