When I lived in North Dakota, my wife and I heard about a little bookstore across the river in Mandan, North Dakota called “Huntington Books”. The bookstore is known as the “oldest bookstore in Mandan” and is a mash up between “Half-priced books” and the kind of underground record store you would find in Chicago. It was here that I found a copy of the “Haunted Wrestling Mansion” by local author M.E. Erickson. The premise behind the book is what caught my attention and I decided to give it a try.

The book is about a mansion in the small town of Lincoln that housed a sort of low-level WWE (think ECW or TNA, just not as violent…sort of…more on that later..) that was the rave of Bismarck/Mandan. The whole populations of Bismarck and Mandan (according to the numbers described in the book) would empty out and crowd this mansion to partake of the festivities…that is until a horrible accident on live TV closes the doors of the mansion and the eventual end of the WWE-esque pro-wrestling federation (see what I meant about violence and wrestling?). Fast-forward to the present, where the book’s protagonist is describing the events that lead up to his ending up in a hospital bed and recounting to the police what had happened after the Mansion reopens under a new wrestling federation with an unscrupulous new owner.

The book harkens to a battle between good and evil such as that in Frank Perreti’s “This Present Darkness” and has the wrestling background of “No Holds Barred“. The writing style is incredibly rough, with the writing style appearing at time to be written in a hurried manner without being fully edited (or published as is). The book is more of a guilty pleasure, along the lines of a low-rated B-movie horror type, but is a wonderful gem if you can dig it.

Look for this book and you won’t be disappointed..you may even get a laugh or two out of it 🙂

3 out of 5 stars