Marion Zimmer Bradley must have had some very strange experiences in the 1970s in Berkeley.

Her book, The Inheritor, is a lot like The House Between the Worlds, which I read recently and didn’t particularly like.

As with Cam, the narrator of House, Leslie is a Bay Area resident trained in Psychotherapy. Leslie is actually a practicing psychologist, who also has custody of her teenage sister Emily, a gifted pianist. They move into a house that seems to be haunted by a dead musician/psychic, who wants them to stay but doesn’t trust her former protege, another musician/psychic, Simon Anstey. Originally, she left him the house in her will, but she changed her mind before her death — for mysterious reasons.

Naturally, Emily begins studying piano and harpsichord with Simon, and Leslie falls in love with him. Charming hippies come out of the woodwork to warn Emily and Leslie about how dangerous Simon is and how he has followed "the left handed path" to try to regain his piano talent after a serious accident.

This story makes more sense than House did, but it still doesn’t hold a candle to her later work.