A different kind of haunted house novel, by the author of East of A and Losers Live Longer.

Spanning six decades, this book tells the story of a small apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan with big ideas, especially when it comes to Halloween.

Apartment Five Is Alive puts a new spin on the haunted house story. It’s about a studio apartment in New York City that “loves” Halloween and punishes its inhabitants who don’t celebrate it the way Apartment Five “thinks” they should. Fast-paced, written to be experienced in one sitting, the novels follows the various fates of the apartment’s tenants over five decades, starting when it was a beloved room in a one-family townhouse then being broken apart and made an “apartment” lived in by people it resented for not being its family anymore, until the 1970s, when crazy young artists started throwing these wild Halloween parties, transforming the apartment once a year into haunted house. It is not until the artist dies in the 1980s and a new tenant moves into the apartment—who doesn’t honor the tradition—that the apartment takes charge and horror begins. Twisted and quirky characters dwell inside of apartment #5, and some of them never leave.

Russell Atwood is the author of the Payton Sherwood mystery novels East of A (Ballantine) and Losers Live Longer (Hard Case Crime).