The 7th Guest : A Novel

The 7th Guest: A Novel is Matthew J. Costello’s 1995 novelization of the 1993 CD-ROM horror game of the same name, which he also designed. The novel expands the game’s tightly compressed haunted-house premise (six guests, a malevolent toymaker named Henry Stauf, a missing seventh guest) into a full 350-page horror story with the prequel material the game implied but never showed. Costello reframes the events of the Stauf mansion from the perspective of the local sheriff’s deputy investigating decades later.

Costello is a working professional in this genre, and the novelization solves the structural problem most game-tie-ins fail: he uses the freedom of prose to put the toy-shop backstory and Stauf’s descent into actual continuous narrative, rather than glimpses. The opening 1936 chapters in Harley-on-the-Hudson are the strongest part of the book, with a slow-burn small-town corruption that earns its 1990s framing chapters. The horror set pieces lean on game-adapted imagery (the mirror puzzle, the cake puzzle, the soup-cans tableau) and land variably.

Recommended for fans of the original 7th Guest game who want the official extended cut, and for readers looking for books like The 7th Guest in the haunted-toymaker subgenre (Ramsey Campbell’s The Grin of the Dark is a useful comparison). Three stars, with the Depression-era opening doing most of the work.