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HobgoblinBy John Coyne Hobgoblin, which harkens back to the glory days of fantasy role-playing games that I and millions of other teens played, is a quick, enjoyable suspense novel. Scott Gardiner and his widowed mother Barbara move to Flat Rock, New York. Barbara takes a job writing a history of a castle owned by a now-dead Irish nobleman. Scott enrolls in the local public high school, and immediately sticks out like a sore thumb. He wears a coat and tie his first day, for which the students label him a preppie, and it soon gets out that he loves a role-playing game called Hobgoblin. That is when all the trouble starts, although the real action is at Ballycastle, a sprawling mansion imported from Ireland in the 1920s by Fergus O'Cuileannain. Fergus, though, seems to have had a strange obsession with bull whips and beautiful teenage girls, several of whom are buried in a nearby cemetery. And is Fergus really dead? The novel has its implausible moments, but overall, it's fun and semi-believable. A horror, fantasy, or Dungeons and Dragons fan would enjoy it. Now out of print, you can buy a used copy at Amazon or a secondhand bookstore (that's where I found it), or check it out of your local library.
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