The House of Dies Drear

The House of Dies Drear is a mystery novel for children by the American writer Virginia Hamilton, published in 1968 and the first of the Dies Drear Chronicles.

Thomas Small is thirteen when his family leaves North Carolina for Ohio and moves into the house that belonged to Dies Drear, an abolitionist who sheltered people escaping slavery and who never came out of the house alive. The building is full of hidden passages and secret stairways meant to conceal those fugitives, and an elderly caretaker, Mr Pluto, lives in a cave on the property that he has fitted out as a home. Thomas's father, a history scholar, has leased the house in order to study it, and the small town around them makes it clear that the family is not entirely welcome. Unexplained noises, lost objects and the sense that somebody is watching turn the house into a puzzle the children have to solve.

Hamilton wrote widely about African American history and experience for young readers, and this novel won the Edgar Award for best juvenile mystery in 1969.