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Summary: Get this book....
Review: ....but dont' read it a night. I was floored on how good this books is. When I heard it was a real life haunting, I had to get it, and I'm sure as hell glad I did.This is the story of Elaine Mercado and her experiences in her haunted house, and how it efected her family. I couldn't read this book at night b/c it was so scary. I have to give Elaine a lot of credit, I'd have been out of that house so fast... Here are some of the things that Elaine and her family had to face... Voices...knocking....poundings....being pushed into her bad at night, and couldn't move. If you love real life ghost stories, then you must get this book.
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Summary: Great book !
Review: A fascinating and compelling true story written by a registered nurse about a true haunting with a home her family purchased. This is on-par but not quite as good as Black Hope Horror. Given my experience in the field I can testify that the events covered in this book are very typical of true hauntings. One of the better haunting story books out on the market.
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Summary: A Fascinating Read
Review: Elaine Mercado takes on this topic with extreme sincerity, writing in great detail about her own experience with the supernatural in a Brooklyn home she still lives in. I found this book fascinating, and read it from cover to cover the day it arrived. Some of the details are frightning, but what I found most engaging was how she and her family handled the day to day life in a rather haunted house. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in a true ghost story.
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Summary: Couldn't put it down!
Review: Extremely well written and captivating. The author's attention to detail was wonderful, making you feel as if you were in the house yourself. Would highly recommend to anyone interested in hauntings.
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Summary: Welcome to Amateur Hour
Review: I have no doubt that author Elaine Mercado and her family truly did live through a scary, paranormal haunting. These things do happen. I know from first-hand experience. When I was a child, my family also lived in a very old house that came with a frightening, uninvited "guest." However, I do think that as a book, this story would have benefited from someone else's writing. Mercado was simply not skillful enough to convey the sort of authentic creepiness and horror that she attempted. The book had a few eerie moments, but after each one, the reader is subjected to pages of Mercado's emotional reaction to them - her off-beat theories, self-doubts, worries, anxieties, frustrations, fears, etc. I couldn't help feeling as though I was watching one of those "Lifetime Movies for Women" that is mainly about emotions and relationships. "Gravesend" had a nauseating, chick-flick-type feel to it all the way through, especially in the excruciating passages where Mercado blathered on and on about how sweet and adorable her children are. When she did describe some of the chilling paranormal experiences, she did an okay job, there just wasn't nearly enough of it. The suspense was buried under so much muck. She also reiterated some of the same events over and over and over, to the point where they were no longer scary or even interesting. It was obvious that I was just wading through filler. Strange, considering how thin this book is. And, bearing in mind the subject matter, it was shockingly dull. What the author lacked was the ability to write cleanly and concisely, and most importantly, to pace the account so that it built toward a satisfying conclusion. Even though this wasn't fiction, it should have read much more smoothly. It reminded me of an essay for a creative writing class that kept getting longer and longer.
One of my gripes was how Mercado always referred to her husband as simply "my husband" and never mentioned his name. Obviously, he didn't wish his name to be included in the book and I can certainly understand that. But for the sake of the reader, she could have introduced him as, "...my husband, Dan (not his real name) ..." or something to that effect, so that the reader at least gets to know him a little bit. He would feel like a person, not just words on a page. As it's written, he seemed to be more of a phantom than the ghosts, just a shadowy figure, spouting nasty things while flitting in and out of the action. She didn't even describe what he looked like or what he did for a living, and gave no basis for his continual nastiness and lack of support. I found that omission to be annoying and amateur. For another complaint, what's with that house in the cover photo? That's not the house described in the book. It looks nothing like it. Once I realized that, I felt cheated. Kind of a "bait and switch" tactic - Hey look, a scary house. That is genuinely creepy. I think I'll buy this book, it looks scary. After blowing twelve bucks and then reading the first chapter: Hey - what's with this cover picture? This isn't the house! What kind of rip-off is this? The publishers could have at least used a photograph of the actual house, or perhaps a room in the house - or better yet, a CAT scan of Elaine Mercado's brain, since the book is mostly about her emotions.
Anyway, to illustrate her writing style, in one memorable segment of the story, Mercado's brother came to her house with his video camera to attempt to film a ghost. The author excitedly related that she couldn't wait for the video "film" to be "developed" so they could see what was on it. Her phrasing was so ridiculous I had to read it three times just to make sure I wasn't seeing things. The book was also riddled with typographical errors, backward quotation marks, and dubious punctuation. Where was the editor when this thing was going to press? As a ghost story, it's not terrible - but the writing surely is. I'm being generous by giving it two stars.
Rating: 
Summary: A great Halloween read
Review: I read Elaine Mercado's "Graves End" in three sittings, not so much because the writing was eloquent or necessarily strong, but because Mercado comes across credible and honest. The book reads like an ordinary person's account of a truly creepy experience and is not at all "Hollywood-ized," which is a breath of fresh air.
I found myself wanting to find out what was behind the hauntings, much like listening to someone tell a ghost story and anxiously awaiting the climax.
While the dialogue is stilted and sometimes trite, I appreciate that this is Mercado's first effort as a writer and think the pacing was fairly good, considering her limited experience.
While at times I was confused by Mercado's description of the layout of her house, I found that she offered a balanced portrayal of the actual paranormal activity and her own pyschological reaction to it.
Although I would have personally called the friendly local neighborhood exorcist after the first paranormal manifestation, I appreciate Mercado's attempts throughout the book to explain why she couldn't just pick up and leave (financial problems, her daughters' schooling, aging parents nearby, proximity to job, etc).
I would recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in the paranormal, particularly ghosts, and is looking for a good, quick and creepy read.
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Summary: good book
Review: i read this book in about 3 days--I was ill, and since there was nothing else to do, I read this book. Once I started, I couldn't start, and I finished in a short amount of time. Very interesting, hard to believe @ times, and somewhat chilling. Highly recommended!!
Rating: 
Summary: honest and spooky
Review: In this book, author Elaine Mercado relates her personal account of living in a haunted house. Although the dialog generally feels forced and the order in which she relays events occasionally feels discordinant, over all, the book was very enjoyable.
I appreciated the author's skepticism, which I felt lent the book a sense of honesty and believability, and there was enough scary stuff to give me a chill- exactly what I am after when I pick up a ghost story.
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Summary: Interesting, But Disappointed. .
Review: Just finished reading this book. It was very interesting and creepy read, BUT why in the heck would you stay in that environment for 10+ years? There needed to be more information on what the psychics found, instead of a wham, bam, thank you ma'am house cleaning. AND. . isn't there a law that if you find human remains they must be excavated?
I believe that what they experience was true, but the book was poorly written and left out some key information regarding pertinant episodes.
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Summary: swallowing....
Review: No, I don't have difficulty swallowing the reality of the experiences this book is about. Not at all. I'm sure it's a very truthful account of what happenened in the spooked house over the years. My difficulty lies with the 'healthy American spirit' of this very much alife woman writing her story, and her obvious and annoying inability to read the right books, talk to the right persons, find the right information to set some steps towards some kind of openminded understanding of what is, maybe, perhaps, who knows, going on. Reading this book I felt increasingly irritated, asking myself what it is that makes people trying to cope with something out of the ordinary for many years, and rather risk their sanity, their health, their children and their happiness than aknowledge the possible existence of something outside their petty prefabricated conceptions?
This book is about the value of an open inquisitive mind, written by somebody who definitely doesn't own one.
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