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A creepy-crawly page-turner about a horrifying home infestation that will get all the way under your skin, from Alex and Susan’s new Brooklyn apartment seems too good to be true. Big kitchen, lots of light, a real bedroom for their little girl, even a studio for Susan to paint in--all for under $4,000 a month. Yes, the landlord is a little intense, and they’re not allowed in the basement, but who needs to go in the basement, right? But then Susan starts hearing mysterious noises, feeling crawling sensations on her skin and in her throat, and seeing bugs nobody else can see. The exterminator swears there are no bedbugs in the building--but does that mean they’re infested with something even worse? From the author of <The Last Policeman <and <The Quiet Boy<, this real-estate nightmare will make you think twice about your dream home.
Auteur
Ben H. Winters is the New York Times best-selling, Edgar Award–winning, and Philip K. Dick Award–winning author of Big Time, The Quiet Boy, Golden State, Underground Airlines, the Last Policeman trilogy, and the mash-up novel Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Ben has also worked extensively in television; he was a writer on the FX cult hit Legion as well as Manhunt on Apple TV+, and he is the creator of the CBS drama Tracker. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, three kids, and one large dog.
Texte du rabat
"First edition published by Quirk Books in 2011 as Bedbugs"
Résumé
From New York Times best-selling and Edgar Award-winning author Ben H. Winters, this supernatural page-turner about a real-estate nightmare will make you think twice about your dream home
Susan and Alex Wendt have found their dream apartment in a gorgeous Brooklyn brownstone.
Sure, the landlady is a little eccentric. And the elderly handyman drops some cryptic remarks about the basement. But the rent is so low, it’s too good to pass up.
Big mistake. Susan awakens every morning with fresh bug bites, but neither Alex nor their daughter, Emma, has a single welt. An exterminator searches the property and turns up nothing. The landlady insists her building is clean. Susan fears she’s going mad—until she makes a chilling discovery in the bonus room.
Filled with Hitchcockian suspense, The Bonus Room is a horrifying tale of a dream home that becomes a nightmare.
Previously published in 2011 as Bedbugs.
Échantillon de lecture
“Hey, Al. Come look at this one.”
     Susan Wendt studied the screen of her MacBook while her husband, Alex, paused the DVR and walked over to the kitchen table. He read the Craigslist ad over her shoulder and delivered a quick verdict: “Bull crap.” He cracked his knuckles and scootched behind her to get to the fridge. “It’s total bull crap, baby.”
     “Hmm. Maybe.”
     “Gotta be. You want?”
     He held up a Brooklyn Lager by the neck and waggled it back and forth. Susan shook her head, scanning the Craigslist ad with a slight frown. Alex opened the beer and went to crouch beside her. “It’s one of those where the broker lures you in and then goes, ‘Oh that place? That place got taken yesterday! How about this one? Rent is joost a leeeeedle beeeet more expensive. . . . ’” He slipped into a goofy gloss on the thick Brazilian accent of the most recent broker to take them on a wild-goose chase through half of south Brooklyn. Susan laughed.
     “But wait,” she said, pointing at the screen again. “It’s not a broker. See? ‘For rent by owner.’”
     Alex raised his eyebrows skeptically, took a swallow of the beer, and wandered back to the TV.
     Their apartment search, now two and a half months old, had been her thing more than his all along. He felt that their current place, a onebedroom-plus-office-nook off Union Square, was perfect. Or, if not perfect, then at least perfectly fine. And the idea of moving, the logistics and the packing and the various expenditures—it all made him want to tear his own head off. Or so he rather vividly expressed it.
     “Plus,” Alex had argued, “I’m not sure this is the time to jack up our rent.”
     Susan had been calm but insistent: it was time. It was time for Emma to have a proper bedroom, one that wasn’t a converted office nook; time for Susan to have a place to set up her easel and paints; time for Alex to have a real kitchen to cook his elaborate meals. “And rents are a heck of a lot lower than they used to be, especially in Brooklyn. Besides, Alex,” she had concluded, making a blatant appeal to his vanity, “you’re doing really well right now. Come on. We can just look, right?”
     Alex had relented, and “just looking” rapidly escalated into a full-on search. Every evening that summer, after Emma had her bath and went to bed, while Alex settled in for his nightly dose of god-awful reality television, Susan trolled Craigslist and Rentals.com and the Times real estate section, entering rents and square footage and broker’s phone numbers on a master spreadsheet dotted with hyperlinks. On the weekends the family tromped from open house to open house, from Fort Greene to Boerum Hill, clutching cups of deli coffee and informational folders from Corcoran, pushing Emma in her bright-pink Maclaren stroller.
     They’d found places they loved for way too much, places in their price range that they hated, and, for occasional variety, places they couldn’t afford and hated anyway. Last weekend they’d schlepped all the way to Red Hook, riding the F train to Smith and Ninth and then the B61 the rest of the way. The apartment they’d seen there, a converted artists’ loft on Van Brunt Street, was Susan’s favorite so far. It was footsteps from Fairway, catercorner from a hipster bakery famous for its salted-caramel tarts, and featured a master bedroom with a thin slice of East River view.
     But the apartment was forty-five minutes from the city, and with no utilities included it was just north of their budget.
     “We really can’t push it on price,” Alex said, shaking his head. “Especially with you not working right now.”
     Susan had smiled tightly, hiding her deep disappointment at his veto. She’d been increasingly and painfully aware, as the apartment search continued, that she had little leverage on the question of cost. It was true—she wasn’t working just then, a state of affairs Alex had totally supported, but it didn’t give her a lot of leeway on rent. She carefully transcribed the details of the “for rent by owner” Craigslist ad into the spreadsheet on her MacBook. They hadn’t even looked in Brooklyn Heights, because—well, what the hell for? No one was renting two-bedrooms in the Heights for under four thousand dollars a month, recession or not. No one except (Susan copied the name carefully from the ad) Andrea Scharfstein, who was offering the top two floors of her Cranberry Street brownstone: “1300 sq. ft., 2BR 2B, d/w, ample closets.” All for a startling $3,550.
     “Thirty-five-fifty?” Alex snorted, fast-forwarding through a commercial break. “Bull crap, baby. Guaranteed.”
When Alex, Susan, and Emma arrived on Cranberry Street a little before their scheduled appointment at 10:30 the next morning, Andrea Scharfstein was waiting for them on the top step of her front stoop, reading the Sunday *Ne…