Gossamer Hall
Erin Samiloglu
Medallion Press
ISBN: 978-1932815894
2007

Gossamer Hall is Brookhaven College's oldest building and is situated a little away from the campus centre.  Dr Killian Hastings is a cranky old history professor, full of his own self-importance and living on a fading reputation gained from a book published years earlier on an Old West gang lead by a vicious killer named Mad Maron.

Mad Maron's treasure was never discovered.  Hastings has decided that he should be the one to find it and, more importantly to him, keep it. But when he discovers that Juan Fuentes, one of the students in his night class on Texas History, is the great-great-grandson of a Monhu medicine man and has the power of "making", creating things literally out of thin air, Hastings hatches a plan to use Juan's abilities to find Maron's gold.  You know that's going to end well.

Reading this book you do get a strong feeling of familiarity - take one group of college students attending a history class, put them all in a big old building (in which they are trapped) and add some zombies.  Ensure that the students are a disparate bunch including football jocks, nerdy types, one Native American and someone guarding a dark secret past, add in a crotchety old professor with an obsession for an old gunslinger and you really have been here before.

A couple of decades ago this kind of book (or film) was reasonably commonplace, so much so that a series of spoof movies (the House films) was made to poke a little kind fun at the form.  It would have been okay in 1987 but can such a title in 2007 do anything except disappoint the reader?

Oddly enough this book isn't awful.  I expected to find it tedious and uninteresting, a dull rehashing of parts of other tales, but it was very readable.  Okay, it has a near total lack of originality, but the author gets on with it.  The action doesn't take an age to start; there are no hundreds of pages of gradual build-up here.  It's one of those books where you blink and another ten pages have gone by.  It's this that proves the book's chief saving grace.

The characters, though stereotyped to some degree, have interesting touches and interact convincingly.  The zombie gunslingers are unpleasantly realised, and prove a good set of bad guys; the situation appropriately full of dread, enough to make you wonder if anyone will survive.  And the death count rises at a suitable pace and in splendidly nasty ways to keep the tension high.

So, although it might not make you go "wow", there are things to recommend about Gossamer Hall.  It's not a book that you need to give full attention to, dipping in and out is fine.  It would be ideal to take on a plane or train journey when you are likely to be interrupted on a regular basis.

 -- I. E. Lester