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A House Divided

by Deborah LeBlanc

Deborah LeBlanc, with her part-Cajun heritage, has come up with another riveting story of the South, including its history of both superstition and actual paranormal experiences. I happen to believe ghosts do exist, since my own mother lived in a haunted house in Philadelphia before she married. The difference between her involvement and those depicted in LeBlanc's A House Divided is that my parent never felt any evil influence around what she saw or heard. My mother's stories are probably at the root of my attraction to the paranormal – but whether based on fact or fiction, Ms. LeBlanc's tale is a powerful, gripping read, with an ever-increasing intensity that forces you to the end without laying the novel aside.

The Prologue:
A woman named Morgan Devillier has four sons, all fairly young. She's just been told that her fifth child had miscarried, and now she's home from the hospital and thinking that at last she knows what she must do about this terrible tragedy. While in the hospital, a minister had stopped by and given her a Bible – she'd opened it at random and came across a verse which seemed a quote directly from God: The iniquity of the fathers would visit their children unto the third and fourth generations. Since her husband was a drunk as well as unfaithful (and her mental capacities had successively diminished with each child she bore), Morgan settled everything by turning on all the gas jets in the house and lying down to die in the hallway between the bedroom where her drunken husband slept and her son's rooms.

An avaricious building contractor by the name of Keith Lafleur is later told he can have the huge, empty Devillier mansion for free if he moves it right away to make room for a new pharmacy. To do that, he divides the house in half, moves it to another town, and renovates the house by making the halves into two separate dwellings on two separate lots he owns. Upstairs in each is an apartment with the first floor devoted to business space. The lots are divided by a small cottage on the lot between.

A young man named Matt lives and works in one of the renovated houses, running a café there named the Tin Cup. He has a small, eight-year-old son, Seth. But odd things begin to happen as soon as the matching house is occupied. The new owners run a beauty salon with a sign saying 'The Beauty Box.” Laura Toups is half owner with a hefty black woman Tawana being the other. Tawana takes care of Moweez, a twenty-five-year-old girl with the mind of a ten-year-old and a speech habit of broken-up sentences difficult to understand.

The two house owners get together while the strange occurrences increase along with deaths and predictive drawings, all to culminate in actual murders combined with a hideous outbreak of boils and a fiery catastrophe. The single objection I have is that it's not made clear either why or how the one responsible for all the spooky occurrences survives in the end while her protector dies in the fire. Otherwise, Deborah LeBlanc writes with intimacy, knowledge, a touch of humor, and a keen sense of familiarity, requiring that you immediately identify with her characters. If you can overlook the lack mentioned above, this is a fine mystery.

Alan Paul Curtis

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