Steven Sherrill is a poet, painter, English professor at Penn State Altoona and banjo player. Oh, yes, and he also writes novels, three so far, the most recent being "The Locktender's House."

Previously, he wrote "Visits from the Drowned Girl" and "The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break."

Although all these books fit into the horror genre, Sherrill is loath to concede it: "The only pattern I'd admit to is challenging myself with every book I write, each one to be different than the others," said Sherrill during a phone interview from his Pennsylvania home. "Yet all three books have things in common. They all occur in a crazy, imaginative place where imagination gets warped. The supernatural is more present in "The Locktender's House."'

In all his books, Sherrill writes "paragraphs as if they were poems, like the music of language. Some say it is overwritten. That criticism seems silly. It's akin to telling a painter he can only use primary colors."

In "The Locktender's House," Janice Witherspoon's boring life is thrown into chaos when her boyfriend, an American soldier, is killed in the Iraqi desert. When his family discovers that she was sharing his North Carolina apartment, they insist she move out. She grabs her meager belongings and hits the road but has no idea where she is going, maybe to meet her boyfriend's body on its return from Iraq.

Inner voices drive her in strange directions and she ends up in rural Pennsylvania where she finds an abandoned, ramshackle lockhouse. Exhausted, she explores the house and is taken by the feeling of calm, so she stays, it turns out, for months. Finally, she meets Stephen Gainy, an art professor and stone carver, and they are attracted to each other.

But strange things keep happening to Janice which eventually puts their promising relationship in jeopardy. Suspense gradually builds until horrific events explode.

It is a masterful work, especially from such a youthful author. Sherrill based the novel on actual events he researched along the canal systems of the Northeast around the turn of the century.

Sherrill admits to having been influenced by the "whackiness" of Tom Robbins and Kurt Vonnegut, especially the latter's "Slaughterhouse Five," although he has also enjoyed Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King. But Michael Ondaatje, author of "The English Patient" and other powerful works, had "the most amazing influence" on him.

"Ondaatje has an orchestra conductor's command of the language," Sherrill said.