Gallows Hill (novel)

Infobox Book
name = Gallows Hill


image_caption =
author = Lois Duncan
illustrator =
cover_artist = Roy Volkmann
country = USA
language = English
series =
subject =
genre = Supernatural Thriller
publisher = Bantam Doubleday Dell
pub_date = 1998
english_pub_date =
media_type = Paperback
pages =
isbn =
oclc =
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"Gallows Hill" (1997) supernatural thriller novel for young adults by Lois Duncan. It was her first and so far only young adult novel written after the death of her daughter. It was written 8 years after her previous young adult's novel "Don't Look Behind You". It is about a girl who moves to a small town with a secret.

Plot summary

Sarah Zoltanne moves to Pine Crest, a small town in Missouri, with her mother Rosemary, who is engaged to a teacher named Ted Thompson. Ted has left his wife, but is not divorced. His daughter, Kyra, hates Sarah who hates her in return. When Sarah starts school as the new pupil, she doesn't make any friends and longs for her hometown.

When the school's students start planning the Halloween fair, Eric Garret, the school golden-boy, convinces Sarah to play a fortune teller at the fortune telling booth. He says it's to benefit the prom and she would be perfect because she's new and almost no one knows her. Sarah accidentally agrees while having a strange vision at home. At the carnival, Kyra feeds her information on the customers coming in. Sarah uses an old paperweight that belonged to her grandmother as her crystal ball.

The night is going well until Sarah does a reading for a boy named Charlie Gorman. When reading for him, she sees a vision in the paperweight of Charlie falling down a flight of stairs. Shaken by the vision, Sarah quickly closes down the booth and leaves.

She becomes friends with Charlie, and discovers that he believes in reincarnation and past lives. Sarah starts writing a history paper about the Salem Witch Trials, and begins having dreams and visions in which she is participating in the trials. Charlie tells her he thinks that everyone in the town participated in the trials, and they're back together to finish something.

Meanwhile, Eric convinces her to start doing readings as a business, but things start going down hill when Sarah makes the popular cheerleaders angry and keeps seeing visions about people. The cheerleaders become convinced that Sarah is witch. Sarah receives threats, such as a sketch of a gallows and a dead crow in her locker. In desperation, she goes to the principal, and then Ted and her mother. Neither party does anything to help her.

Later, Ted forces Sarah to go to a party with Kyra. Eric comes by to pick up Sarah for the party, but she has changed her mind about it. Eric persuades her to come out and apologize to Kyra, but she is forced into the car and brought to the party. Eric and the others take Sarah to Garrote Hill, in the middle of Pine Crest, where many drunk students are waiting. The students begin acting strangely and calling the place Gallows Hill, the place in Salem, Massachusetts where the witches of the trials were hanged. They try to hang Sarah, but Charlie intervenes, and the students suddenly relive their past lives in Salem before attacking Charlie. Sarah almost ends up getting hanged until Ted saves her.

Sarah and Rosemary decide to move back to California, and Sarah realizes that in a past life, she was Betty Parris, the young girl who brought the Salem Witch Trials. She leaves Charlie with a kiss, and gives him the paperweight. It was once cloudy, but now it is 'clear and transparent as window glass'.

Television/movie adaptation

A TV-movie called "I've Been Waiting For You" (1998), loosely based on the novel, was made. It was an NBC Movie of the Week and starred Sarah Chalke, Markie Post and Soleil Moon Frye.

ee also

*Salem Witch Trials
*Gallows Hill
*Witchcraft