Jan had felt it the very first day, walking up to the door of the old house. She had known the watcher was there as they knocked and waited for old Mrs. Carstairs to come. And the little old woman, glancing at the woods, had known it was there, too.

The other night, for some weird reason, I happened to think of this book. I read it in the early 80s, as a preteen, and was totally creeped out by it...as well as by the movie with Lynn Holly Johnson and Bette Davis. Yet, as scared as I was, I also found myself oddly obsessed with it. Both invaded my nightmares for weeks afterward! Yikes!:) ( )

http://books.moonsoar.com/archives/2011/04/08/the-watcher-in-the-woods/ ( )

Boiled down to its essence, this is an interesting story, and who doesn't love the cult-classic Disney movie? But the book is so badly written that it becomes difficult to make yourself finish it. The dialogue is bad, the logic is outlandish, the descriptions are over-wordy and repetitive. I mainly kept reading because I wanted to find out how it would end, and I suspected (rightly) that it would be very different from the movie. In a word, this book is frustrating, and I don't really recommend it except as an exercise in curiosity. ( )