‘Trucker Ghost Stories’ – Edited by Annie Wilder (Tor)

Do you believe in ghosts and things like that? I’m pretty sure that everyone reading this blog does; if we didn’t why would we read the books that we do? We all want to believe that this kind of thing really does happen, outside of books, so when I saw ‘Trucker Ghost Stories’ I jumped on it like a shot.
Having read it though… I think I might stick with the fiction in future as real life isn’t anywhere near as scary (not if this book is anything to go by). I'd normally post some kind of blurb here but the premise of the collection is really simple, 'true tales of ghostly encounters on the highways and byways of America'.

‘Trucker Ghost Stories’ is only a very slight two hundred and forty six pages long but I have to say that my journey through it felt like I was reading a book three times the length. More of a chore than a pleasure then, not a great state of affairs…

The biggest issue, I thought, was in the subject matter itself and how it (probably quite unwittingly) forms a pattern that gives the book a repetitive feel that verges on the wrong side of hypnotic. Think about it, trucker ghost stories… Collect them all together and what you have here are dozens of stories that all begin with a variation of ‘I was driving one night’ and end on a variation of ‘I was really scared by the ghostly woman/car that drives itself, I never drove down that road again’. It’s really hard not to feel like you’re reading the same story over and over again.

I also found myself wondering whether Wilder had enough material, to fill the book, when she opened things up to include UFO and alien sightings along with the ghostly trucker stuff. Is the book aimed at more than one audience or are there just not that many ghosts haunting the highways and byways of America? I don’t know.
What I do know though is that stories like ‘Alien Encounter at Deacon’s Corner Truck Stop’ come across as being more about someone’s chance to expound upon their theories (to a captive audience) rather than tell a genuinely unsettling tale. If you explain things in too much detail, where’s the mystery and (ultimately) the chill in the tale? Moments like these cast an awfully big shadow over the rest of the book.

I’ve also got to wonder how Wilder determined the truth of these tales before they went in the collection. After all, you only have someone else’s word for it… In this instant, I’m thinking of ‘Hat Man on the Montreal Avenue Bridge’ in particular. Here’s a tale that’s a little too descriptive for my liking (‘fallen leaves scattered like insects…’ anyone?); this really takes away from the ‘matter of fact’ air that generally comes with true stories. If this were the only problem though I wouldn’t have minded too much. No, the ‘ghost’ of the piece is almost a spitting image of the ‘Walking Dude’ from Stephen King’s ‘The Stand’. Coincidence or something… less original? I will let you decide (I was just waiting for the narrator to come down with the flu)…

Another one of the problems I found with the book can be best summed up by the words of one of the contributors,

‘This may not sound very scary, and that may be due to my lack of writing skills’ (‘Skinwalker in Arizona’, Lee Honawu)

You have people in this collection that have obviously been scared by something but lack the language to get this across on the page. A little too ‘matter of fact’ maybe… You can read about things that must have been really scary but if the writer cannot make you feel that then it’s a bit of a damp squib really… Moments like this also cast a shadow on the book as a whole; a book that’s meant to be scaring its readers.

I must say that there are some really unsettling tales that do leave an impression on the reader. I’m thinking of ‘The Bloody Bride Bridge’ in particular, a real lesson in timing the chills to perfection. I don’t often jump at a book but I did here! Unfortunately this doesn’t really balance out the underlying issues of ‘Trucker Ghost Stories’, a book that really isn’t it for the long haul in terms of unnerving its readers…

Six out of Ten

‘Alone’ – Brian Keene

So it was half three this morning and I was wide awake, Hope having climbed into bed with me and made herself comfortable. I couldn’t move and there was no way that I was going back to sleep; I couldn’t turn on the light for a read but luckily I was able to grab my phone and its ‘oh so handy’ Kindle app…
I’d been reading about Keene’s brief foray into self-publishing, a couple of days ago, and figured that I deserved a little ‘Keene goodness’ as a reward for toddler induced insomnia (I’m a fan if you didn’t know already). After some messing around with the Internet on my phone, and £1.53 spent, ‘Alone’ was all mine and waiting to be read.

At only fifteen thousand words long, ‘Alone’ didn’t demand too much from me (a good job really all things considered) but gave a lot in return. I’d rather have had the sleep but ‘Alone’ was still a great way to while away a couple of those early morning hours, despite how unsettling the read was…

Blurb copied and pasted because… Well, I’m tired…

When Daniel Miller wakes up one morning, something has gone terribly wrong. The power is out. The phones are dead. The house is silent. The street is shrouded in fog. Both his partner and their adopted daughter are missing. So are their neighbours. And so is everyone else in the world. Daniel Miller is the last person left on Earth... or is he?
‘Alone’ is one of those books where you get to the end and think, ‘Why didn’t I see that coming? The ending is so obvious…’ Well, without giving too much away, the clues are there but Keene cleverly disguises them with a whole load of other stuff that grabs your attention and distracts you at just the right moments. There’s even a moment where Keene basically tells you what has happened but the doubt (and despair) in Miller’s mind pushes the plot on before you really have a chance to get your head around it.

The chief distractions are the atmosphere on Miller’s street and his own bewilderment about what has happened. Having no idea about what is going on Miller assumes that something has happened to everyone else and watching his theory gradually being disproved really adds to the tension. Miller panics more and more, no closer to discovering the truth, and you can’t help but share that anxiety (even if that little voice at the back of your head is telling you what’s really going on). You can’t help but get caught up in it all.

The fog, in his street, is a brooding presence throughout the book and it grows on you with each page that passes. This is even more the case once Miller finds what is waiting for him in the midst of that fog. I was willing Miller to make it back to his house before the thing in the fog caught up with him (that was one frantic paragraph in the book!)

There’s a lot of build up to the revelation then but when that revelation finally gets there… Well, it’s a tiny bit of an anti-climax (it just feels a little too obvious) but, at the same time, I also felt like I had to give Keene his dues for pulling the wool over my eyes for as long as he did. The ending is a bit abrupt but, given the nature of that ending, you can’t really blame Keene for concluding on that note.

Not a perfect book then, by any means, but what a ride in the meantime. ‘Alone’ takes a familiar premise and disguises it so well that you’re not a hundred percent sure what you’re reading until the very end…

Eight and Three Quarters out of Ten

‘Anna Dressed In Blood’ – Kendare Blake (Tor)

There’s no point in my pretending that I’m not a complete Jackdaw when it comes to a nice shiny (and well presented of course) book cover. The author’s name is a big draw, of course, and the blurb will more often than not seal the deal one way or the other. It’s the cover that catches my eye first though and that’s always been the way it has gone; cover art is there to look good on your shelf (in the years to come) but it’s there to draw your initial attention above all. As much as it pains me to say it, the recent ‘garishly yellow’ Gollancz covers are certainly effective in this respect...

All of which, in a round about kind of way, brings me to the cover for ‘Anna Dressed In Blood’. Take one look at that haunting cover and tell me that you’d walk past without giving it a second glance at least. All those greys and blacks, with the merest hint of red, caught my eye straight away and a quick glance over the blurb pretty much decided it for me that I’d be reading this book.
Having finished it though... I’m wondering if my tendency to jump on nice cover art got the better of me this time round, and not in a good way...

Cas Lockwood is much like any other seventeen year old apart from one important detail... Cas kills ghosts for a living, just as his father did before him until his untimely death at the hands of a ghost that he was hunting.
Now Cas travels the country with his mother (a witch), taking note of ghosts that kill and killing them before they kill again. Their travels bring them to a small town in search of a ghost called ‘Anna Dressed In Blood’; a ghost that violently kills anyone who steps inside the house that she haunts, a ghost in a white dress stained red with her own blood. Cas has never come across anything like Anna Dressed In Blood, especially when she spares his life instead of killing him where he stands. There are questions that Cas needs to answer if he is to stop Anna killing again. Some of the answers though, they will take him further back into his past than he is ready to go...

‘Anna Dressed In Blood’ not only has a great premise, it also has a mystery demanding to be solved by a main character that I couldn’t help but find myself liking a lot. Cas Lockwood has a hard life but he is always willing to make that sacrifice, for his father’s memory, and aiming to be the best in what seems to be a very lonely profession despite everything else. You’ve got to admire that strength of will (especially when Blake makes you well aware of what Cas is deliberately choosing to miss out on) and I found myself rooting for Cas all the more because of it. Cas is able to dispatch ghosts in fine style and Blake shows us these moments in an understated way that is all the more powerful for this approach. I also enjoyed following the supporting cast and watching Cas slowly start to open up to others as they offered him their support (a great aid to Cas’ development as a character).

The initial mystery also drew me in very easily. What led Anna to haunt that house in the first place? And why is she able to stop herself killing Cas? These are some pretty intriguing questions and there was no doubt that I was going to be around to see how things played out, especially as it all takes place in a rather bleak setting that accentuates the challenge Cas is facing both with Anna as well as the world of ghosts in general.

Unfortunately, this is where things started to fall down for me and in quite a big way.

It may well be that I missed something but you never really find out why Anna is able to spare Cas’ life in the early stages of the book other than that ‘she doesn’t need to kill him’; she is one vicious ghost (Blake doesn’t pull any punches here, as is also the case with creepier moments that are full of tension) and there is no doubt that Cas would not have survived her attack. You’re just left to get on with it and the feeling I got from this was that Anna’s mercy wasn’t really a part of the plot, it was just there to let things move forward and that felt like a bit of a cheat to me. Admittedly, Cas and Anna’s relationship moves to some interesting places because of this but the way it is handled, in those early chapters, left me cold.

In the same kind of way, it felt that the two sub-plots (‘Cas and Anna’, ‘Cas and his past’) didn’t really gel and I guess I was looking for something a little more cohesive here. My big question (without giving too much away) was why Cas hadn’t encountered this situation much earlier. Blake offers a convincing explanation but it still felt awfully convenient that things would explode at the moment they did; almost like there wasn’t enough of the ‘Anna plot’ to carry things for a whole book and the ‘big reveal’ was needed a lot earlier than people realised.
Balancing things out, Blake does an amazing job of drawing the tension out (as Cas realises just what he is facing) and the finale is explosive and a little tragic at the same time.

‘Anna Dressed In Blood’ offers plenty to get you started but ultimately didn’t quite deliver for me, despite some promising moments. It’s a shame as the book had a lot of potential to begin with...

Seven out of Ten

‘Nowhere Hall’ – Cate Gardner (Spectral Press)

Gary McMahon’s ‘What They Hear In The Dark' had me sorely tempted to take up a subscription to Spectral Press’ limited edition chapbook series, it was that good. Unfortunately, my wallet has the deciding vote in such matters and felt compelled to exercise its power of veto on that occasion… I was lucky enough though to have the chance to get my hands on another chapbook from Spectral and I didn’t pass up on the opportunity, even though I’d never read anything of Cate Gardner’s until now.


Having read ‘Nowhere Hall’, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Spectral Press have a keen eye for writers who can tell a very spooky tale in less than thirty pages. Gardner has a novella and short novel on the horizon and if ‘Nowhere Hall’ is anything to go by then I will have to seek them out.

While Ron was contemplating the biggest decision of his life the world moved on without him and left him standing outside a ruined hotel, the Vestibule.
What lies inside won’t answer that one question; instead it will leave him with many more. Ron is about to enter a haunted house like no other…

‘Nowhere Hall’ is a flickering tale that leads you into a haunted house that could either be hiding in plain sight or could just as easily be the last crumbling bastion of a man’s crumbling psyche. It’s a compelling question that Ron has no answer to; we have to take that journey with him if we are going to find out. I’ll tell you now that it’s a journey worth taking, for the sake of the journey itself if not the final destination.

‘Traffic-borne wind gusted. A fist to his stomach urged him back, the wind flapping through layers of starch to wrap Ron’s trousers round his shins. The kerb edge drove its ridge through his soul.’
Right from the start, Gardner reels you in by the simple method of only telling you three quarters of the story. Just enough to get you started but you have to work out that last quarter for yourself and that’s what gradually leads you through the doors of the Vestibule hotel… That’s when things get seriously weird.
Ron has no idea what’s happening and Gardner uses this to make everything that happens even more terrifyingly strange, moving you forward in Ron’s footsteps as he seeks to make sense of his surroundings… and escape.

The hotel itself makes for an unsettling background with its ability to change the rules of a game that only it knows it’s playing. Some of the imagery is perhaps a little too familiar (mannequins in a dusty ballroom) but no less creepy for that.
The answers we are finally given bring into focus that isn’t the one that you were expecting. A picture that perhaps could breathe more easily had the tale been a little longer. I did find myself questioning the likelihood of the ending but, thinking back on it, possibly only because I’d really come to like Ron and wanted better for him. I think he found what he was looking for though.
Full of the kind of familiar yet insidious imagery that gives you weird dreams days after you’ve read the book, ‘Nowhere Hall’ made sure that there was no doubt that I’d finish it off and I’ll be sure to look for Cate Gardner’s name on the shelves in the future. I want to see what she writes next.

Eight and Three Quarters out of Ten

‘What they hear in the dark’ – Gary McMahon (Spectral Press)

Who says that horror is a dead genre? Leisure Fiction may have done their best to kill it off in the US, and the current deluge of Urban Fantasy doesn’t leave it what’s left a lot of room on the bookshelves, but it’s still there for those of us who know where to look. Spectral Press is the latest small publisher to give the genre a shot in the arm with its release of limited edition chapbooks dedicated to the ghostly and supernatural. ‘What they hear in the dark’ is actually Spectral Press’ first publication and definitely bodes well for the future…

After their young son’s murder, Rob and Becky bought the old house as a way of trying to save their marriage by building something new. It was never going to be as easy as that though, some cracks were never meant to be papered over and the couple’s relationship is at a breaking point.
Then Rob and Becky find a room in the house that was never in the plans, a room that swallows all sound and leaves you with only your own thoughts for company. A room where demons can either be exorcised or given free rein…

I’ve never read a chapbook before so was interested to see that ‘What they hear in the dark’ is only twenty-one pages long. The shortest books I normally read are around the three to four hundred page mark so it was a real change to read something that would literally take as long to read as it would take to have a cup of coffee (I drink coffee that I make very quickly!)

‘What they hear in the dark’ initially came across as very rushed with the ending arrived at before you’ve had a chance to get acquainted with the beginning. I’m writing that off as my unfamiliarity with the chapbook format though, it is only twenty-one pages long after all! A second read through really paid dividends though.

You may not have much of a chance to get to find out much about Rob and Becky but what McMahon does do is build up an oppressing ‘haunted house’ atmosphere in a very short space of time, working this around Rob and Becky’s very differing feelings over their son’s death. Things are sign posted very clearly but this somehow adds to the overall tension that arises as things progress. You know what’s happening, Rob and Becky don’t, but there’s nothing you can do to stop it. The ending is particularly chilling as one of the couple finds out the worst possible consequences of bringing your own ghosts to the Quiet Room. It was at this point that I was literally holding my breath and McMahon cruelly ends the story in such a way that I had to release that breath just after finishing.

Gary McMahon is fast becoming a horror writer to look out for and ‘What they hear in the dark’ is a fine example of his natural skill in this field; a tale that creeps up on you and has it’s claws in you before you know it. Grab it if you can.

Nine out of Ten

P.S. I wouldn’t normally post links to buy books but these chapbooks are very limited edition (only a hundred at a time being printed I think) and you will miss out if you’re not careful. Click Here for more information – I think I might have to take out a subscription.

‘The Silent Land’ – Graham Joyce (Gollancz)

As much fun as high octane military sci-fi can be (and it is), you have to be careful not to overdose on the stuff. One book too many and you run the very dangerous risk of breaking out in state of the art body armour and wondering what the girl you left behind on Earth is up to... I recognise the symptoms only too well so knew when it was time to put the Black Library books down and go for something completely different instead.
And you can’t get a lot more different than Graham Joyce, fine purveyor of literature that sits in your head and messes with your brain for days after you’ve finished reading the book. That’s what happened with me when I read ‘The Tooth Fairy’ way back in 2008. Here’s a book that you can’t really say is ‘enjoyable’ as such but it’s certainly one that you can’t help but chew on and, in that sense, it is a more than satisfying read. After finishing ‘The Tooth Fairy’ I somehow never got round to reading any more of Joyce’s work and the arrival of ‘The Silent Land’ prompted me to rectify matters there! As with ‘The Tooth Fairy’, ‘The Silent Land’ isn’t an enjoyable read as such but it does give you plenty to chew on...

Zoe and Jake are on a romantic skiing break when they become caught right in the middle of an avalanche. They manage to escape relatively unhurt and return to their hotel only to find that the entire village is completely empty. Reasoning that the village has been evacuated, Zoe and Jake attempt to make their way down the mountain only to find that various routes all lead them right back to where they started. Ensuing hallucinations and weird occurrences lead them to believe that perhaps they never survived the avalanche but if this is the case, what happens next...?

‘The Silent Land’ is a very short tale (seriously, a ‘blink and you might just miss it’ two hundred and forty eight pages long) of true love that is put to its ultimate test. It had me gripped throughout and there may have even been a couple of moments where I had to pretend that there wasn’t a tear in my eye. What the book also was though was a book with an ending that I saw coming from a mile off, possibly far earlier than it should have been apparent.

Now, part of me wonders if the ending wasn’t so much the point as it was the interactions and changing relationship between Zoe and Jake as they make sense of their surroundings. The growing sense of inevitability, that the clearly signposted ending brings, does push Zoe and Jake’s relationship to it limits and in interesting new directions from time to time. By leaving the ending in no doubt, you can argue that Joyce leaves his readers free to concentrate on the really cool stuff instead. It might just be me though but what I found was that this foreshadowing really took the sting out of the tale for me; I’m one of those folks who doesn’t like to have the ‘big reveal’ sprung on them right until the end (or at the very least, just before) so to know what’s looming on the horizon did make me wonder why I was continuing to read at times...

That reason became very apparent early on though. Like I said, Joyce leaves his readers free to concentrate on the cool stuff and there is more than enough of this to keep a reader like me very happy indeed.

While Joyce may leave the ending in no doubt, all the clues that go towards that ending are immediately engaging and very mysterious, you’ll know how it all ends but what you’ll spend the time on is working out how all these clues fit together in the final puzzle. That what was happened with me as I spent time musing over things like how only Zoe could hear her mobile phone ringing... When the answers come, everything slides together perfectly and it all makes sense. Perhaps the delivery of that final revelation comes across as a little flat but, again, that’s almost beside the point. It’s all about Zoe and Jake and how they come to terms with their situation.

Zoe and Jake’s relationship is the focal point of the story and it is refreshing to see the direction that it travels in over the course of the book. Instead of moving their relationship from one point to another, Joyce reflects how relationships play out in real life by throwing Zoe and Jake’s relationship hither and yon whilst battering it with various revelations. The more things change the more they stay the same though and you are left in no doubt as to how these two people really feel about each other. This approach lends a real sense of loss to those final pages; a feeling that stayed with me for a long time afterwards.

‘The Silent Land’ is a novel that is perhaps signposted a little too clearly to be really effective but makes up for this in a number of smaller (but still important) ways. It’s certainly a novel that has left me eager not to miss out on any of Joyce’s work in the future.

Eight and a Half out of Ten

‘Apartment 16’ – Adam Nevill (Pan)

Horror isn’t as stagnant as you would think; it’s certainly not dead. Horror is simply doing what it has always done; lurking in shadowy corners waiting to trap the unwary… Have a look at the ‘Mammoth Book of Best New Horror’ series and you’ll see what I mean.

A quick look at the bookshelves though would have you excused in thinking that this isn’t the case at all. Go into any bookstore and you’ll see the usual suspects taking up shelf space along with certain urban fantasy titles that booksellers really don’t know where to put. I’m looking forward to seeing writers like Brian Keene, Gary McMahon, Conrad Williams and Maynard & Sims making the horror shelves as varied as they deserve to be. Maybe that’s for the future but, in the meantime, this coming May could well be the start of it all. Adam Nevill’s ‘Apartment 16’ is by no means perfect but I found that I couldn’t put it down until I’d finished reading…

There’s an empty apartment in the exclusive Barrington House in London. There’s also a night porter who, over the coming weeks, will come to wish that he had never looked inside… If that wasn’t enough, there’s also a young American woman (Apryl) who has been left an apartment, in Barrington House, by her mysterious Great Aunt Lillian; a woman who died in strange circumstances. It isn’t the same flat but the two are connected by a horrific event that took place decades ago. Barrington House hasn’t been the same since and Apryl is determined to discover why. She may end up wishing that she hadn’t though; evil lives on in Barrington House and Apartment 16 is the gateway to somewhere even more horrifying…

‘Apartment 16’ is a bit of a slow burner. When it really gets going the book has a ready capacity to shock but you do have to jump through some over familiar hoops before you get to the good stuff. It’s a bit of a shame really when you see how good the book can be once Nevill lets his imagination run wild and unleashes fear on his reader. I found myself wishing that the whole book could have been like that.
The opening chapters do a fine job of setting the scene and laying little clues in place that end up making a lot of sense once you get to the end. What they also do however is throw a lot of typical ‘ghostly moments’ at the reader that I’ve seen many times before. Shadowy figures in the corner of Apryl’s eye, Apryl waking up to find all is not as it seems through one nasty surprise or another. The concept was enough to keep me reading through these early stages but I just wasn’t getting that delicious chill down my spine that genuinely terrifying ghost stories give you. Stick with it though, it’s worth sticking with.

Was Nevill just lulling his reader into a false sense of security, through a sense of the familiar, or was he aiming for scares that didn’t hit the mark? I don’t know. What I do know though is that the mid to latter stages of the book had me hooked and unnerved all at once. As the mystery of Barrington House unfolds, the tension is racked up mercilessly as Apryl begins to understand what she is facing. The whole landscape of the novel changes as things become clearer, what at first appears to be normal slowly becomes anything but and the tone of the book becomes more and more oppressive as time passes. The sense of evil is overpowering (is there anything more evil than a nasty child…?) and that’s when occurrences get truly scary. All of this is skilfully drawn out until a finale that’s in keeping with all good ghost and horror tales. If someone deserves a bad ending then that is what ‘Apartment 16’ has in store with them. However, no-one comes out of a good ghost tale unscathed and ‘Apartment 16’ plays by these rules too…

Apryl is a hard character to engage with purely because she is so out of her depth in a city that she has never visited before as well as out of her depth in terms of the evil that she faces. She spends so much time trying to work things out, or fit in, that you never get much of a chance to find out who she really is, only what she is trying to do. This is great in terms of moving the plot forward quickly but I would have preferred to see a main character with a little more substance to her.
Luckily, there is a lot more to the character of Seth and this was where the real fun was for me. While things that go bump in the night are scary enough, the true terror is in seeing someone fall under the sway of evil and gradually deteriorate mentally. This is what Nevill gives us and he really plays with his reader’s emotions by swing Seth back and forth between a forlorn hope of redemption and eternal damnation. You don’t know where Seth will end up and that’s what kept me reading, that and the sense of London as a dead weight hanging around Seth’s neck and driving him to distraction all the more.
The chapters mainly switch back and forth between Seth and Apryl’s viewpoints (with the occasional switch to a supporting character) and that’s where things fell a little flat for me. I loved Seth’s chapters but was ambivalent about those featuring Apryl. What I got as a result was a ‘seesaw’ effect of enjoyment and being a little non-plussed, something that made the book feel a little choppy in terms of it’s pacing on occasion.

Nevill’s writing is powerful enough though for this issue not to be too much of an obstacle though and once you get past the opening stages of the book you’re in for a real treat if you like ghost stories that will scare you to your core. I love reading horror fiction/ghost stories and Adam Nevill is definitely a name that I will be keeping an eye open for in the future…

Eight and a Half out of Ten

‘No Doors. No Windows’ – Joe Schreiber (Del Rey)

According to my local supermarket it’s pretty much Christmas time already (you should see the stuff they are stocking) which means that, despite the fact that it’s still September, I’m already woefully behind with my Halloween reading! :o) I decided to take care of that straight away and first up is Joe Schreiber’s ‘No Doors, No Windows’ (due to be released in the next couple of weeks by Del Rey). Ever since I saw the cover art for Schreiber’s ‘Deathtroopers’ I’ve been looking forward to picking it up, not long to go now... ‘No Doors, No Windows’ seemed like a good book to tide me over in the meantime; sometimes the best way to find out about a forthcoming book is to read the author’s books that have preceded it.
I finished ‘No Doors, No Windows’ on the way into work this morning. I’m hoping for a little more from ‘Deathtroopers’ but the initial signs are that we could be in for a bit of a treat. ‘No Doors, No Windows’ is a scary read...

Scott Mast is back in his New England hometown helping clean out the family home after his father’s funeral; he doesn’t expect to be around for too long but events are about to conspire to keep him town for a lot longer than he thought. If he’s not careful, Scott will never leave...
An unfinished manuscript, of his father’s, leads Scott to the house the story was set in and a decision to finish the book that his father began. It’s not entirely Scott’s own decision though... There’s more to this house than meets the eye; dark parts of the Mast family history is tied up in the house’s secret passageways and so is the curse that is even now wrapping it’s fingers around Scott’s fragile mind... Will he be able to withstand it or will Scott be driven to the same acts of madness that have claimed the minds of generations of men in the Mast family?

I’m a bit of a sucker for ghost stories especially when I’m on my own in the house... Or am I? What was that noise I just heard..? A good ghost story wraps you up in its plot and smacks you with something so scary (that you never saw coming) that you just have to go and check all the doors to make sure that nothing else is in the house with you. ‘No Doors, No Windows’ does this very well but I was left thinking that there was room for a little more...

Schreiber weaves an impressive tale right from the start. The reader knows that there’s something a little odd right from the start and Schreiber doles out little snippets of information that keep the plot moving forward (and kept my interest) and point towards something ominous on the horizon. You don’t get the whole picture until right at the end but what Schreiber feeds us in the meantime is tantalising enough to keep us turning those pages. The setting is appropriately bleak as well, a New England town (why does all the scary stuff seem to happen in New England towns?) that’s brimming over with secrets that no-one wants to let out. If that wasn’t enough there’s a monster snow storm on the way and it’s just the kind of storm that’s apt to trap people just when they’re trying to get away from their worst nightmare...

I enjoyed Schreiber’s characterisation as well; love em’ or hate em’, all of the main players are well rounded out with enough secrets about them to make you want to find out more and see how these make them develop. Scott and Owen in particular are characters that I wanted to invest my time in and this involvement made the ‘scary bits’ even scarier when they jumped out of the page and grabbed me.

Schreiber writes some mean passages that made me shudder as well as, on one occasion, say ‘What the f...’ Don’t underestimate this man; Schreiber switches effortlessly from writing scenes that seem perfectly normal, until you realise just what has happened, to hitting his reader with the full horror of what lies within the Round House. He’s also not afraid to leave his reader hanging, at the end of a chapter, and this approach had me racing through the pages to find out what happened next.

What I found though is that for every time Schreiber got the timing just right he also had a habit of building up to climatic events a little too much. When this happened there was so much detail that the payoff came across as almost an afterthought and this really interrupted the flow of the plot. The abundance of detail didn’t leave a lot room for the ending either. Sometimes events are rushed, in real life, and there is an argument for having the book end in this way. I couldn’t help thinking though that a little more detail in the right place (instead of having to cram explanations in at the death) would have made all the difference.

While I had issues with the structure of ‘No Doors, No Windows’, the story itself is very entertaining and kept me reading throughout. I’m even more excited about reading ‘Deathtroopers’ (look out for the little mention in the book!) now...

Eight and a Half out of Ten

‘The House of Lost Souls’ – F.G. Cottam (Thomas Dunne Books)

I can read pretty much any horror novel with only the occasional raising of the eyebrows and a muttered ‘bloody hell, that’s got to hurt...’; ghost stories are a different deal though... If the horror is right up there in my face, where I can see it happening, then I’m fine but a steadily increasing dose of terror and haunting (that you can only just catch a glimpse of from the corner of your eye) is a little too much, even for me! It all goes back to when I was at primary school and I read a short story about a creature called The Eater of Souls... but that’s another story.
As a result you won’t normally catch me reading very many ghost stories but this blog is all about me trying out new stuff, and the blurb for ‘House of Lost Souls’ looked very interesting, so here we are!

Just weeks after crossing the threshold of the old Fischer house one student has committed suicide and the other three are slowly going insane. One of the students is Nick Mason’s sister and he is not prepared to let her go without a fight. In order to save her, Nick must join forces with Paul Seaton who ventured inside the Fischer house (a decade ago) and experienced similar things. Seaton is not prepared to risk losing an already tenuous grip on sanity by revisiting the ghosts of his past but Mason is desperate. Photographer Pandora Gibson-Hoare’s secret journal sheds light on the act of evil that took place in the Fischer House back in the 1920s and will provide the clues to what Seaton and Mason must do to fight the evil that still lurks there...

If you go back over some of my reviews you’ll see that, every now and then, I pick up a book (almost at random) and end up discovering a real gem. The bottom line is that this is exactly what happened with ‘The House of Lost Souls’; it’s a flawed diamond but a diamond nevertheless...

‘The House of Lost Souls’ begins with a mystery in a graveyard, a mystery that manifests itself in a very unsettling manner. Cottam’s description of what happened had my spine tingling in just the way that a decent ghost story should and that was only a precursor to what was to come...

Cottam is of the belief that if a character doesn’t know why an unplugged radio suddenly starts playing ragtime music then the reader shouldn’t know either, at least not until the time is right. What the reader gets, as a result, is a series of ghostly happenings that always come as a sinister and deeply unsettling surprise. If this wasn’t bad enough, Cottam doesn’t let you get into the habit of expecting these things to happen. Sometimes an occurrence will be easily explained, sometimes it won’t. You never know until you get there and this enhances the air of uncertainty and the ability of the book to make you jump when you least expect it...

The mystery behind the Fischer House is gradually revealed over the course of the book and the final picture you are given is not the one that you are expecting it to be. I liked the tangent the book went off on towards the end; I’m also a big fan of the ambiguous ending that will have you wondering what happened next... The mystery of the Fischer House is never anything less than intriguing and is drawn out in an expert manner that kept my interest throughout.
However, the manner in which the mystery is revealed is also the Achilles heel for ‘House of Lost Souls’ and a potentially brilliant book suffers as a result...

Three separate stories come together to make up ‘House of Lost Souls’ and all credit to Cottam for weaving these stories in such a way that everything ties together at the end. Nick Mason is the catalyst for events in the present day and sets the ball rolling at an urgent pace. Pandora Gibson-Hoare’s journal fills in the gaps and is a compelling story all by itself; Cottam had me really feeling for her as she got into events way over her head...
As the main character of the piece, Seaton’s tale had to include his previous visit to the Fischer House in order to give some credence to his behaviour in the present. His experience in the house was suitably terrifying but the build up to it... well, it didn’t put me off the book entirely but it was a real struggle to get through.
While the events, leading up to Seaton going into the house, all fit together and make sense (there’s also a real feeling of tragedy around them), Cottam’s portrayal of London in the early nineteen eighties came across to me as too heavily done with loads of descriptive prose drowning out the story itself. It certainly didn’t feel to me as if this was Seaton’s London, I wondered if Cottam himself was reminiscing about his life there...

This overindulgence made for heavy going reading, at just the wrong time, but is a minor quibble about a ‘more than just promising’ debut. ‘The House of Lost Souls’ is a gripping, intense and un-nerving read that I think will appeal to any fan of the supernatural. I hope that F.G. Cottam writes more books like this.

Nine out of Ten

P.S. Look out for 'The House of Lost Souls' at the beginning of July. If you fancy your chances at winning a copy then stop by here on Sunday... ;o)