​THIRTEEN OUTSTANDING HALLOWEEN HAUNTINGS

The thirteen novels, novellas and one short story collection featured in this Halloween Hauntings feature have several things in common, the most important of these is that they are all outstanding reads and rank amongst the best books I have reviewed since 2016. There is an outstanding mix of relative newcomers to the genre such as Andrew Cull and John Hunt, mixing with genre big-hitters Adam Nevill and even all-time legend Graeme Masterton makes an appearance.

As it is Halloween time the inter-connecting theme of this article is hauntings, either in the context of haunted house fiction, or more personal individual hauntings. So, there are no zombies or vampires, just good old-fashioned scares. Which is, after all, the life-blood of the genre.  

The final featurethe thirteen entries have in common are that they have all been previously reviewed by me, either on Ginger Nuts of Horror or HorrorTalk.Com. I spend a lot of time mulling over my reviews, so this thirteen are all books I have put much thought into this selection. All have been published in the last couple of years and the reviews are brief rewrites of the much longer original reviews.

They are presented in alphabetical order by author. 

If you wish to purchase any of these books please click on the covers to take you to your country specific Amazon store.  Doing so helps to keep Ginger Nuts of Horror online.  

Simon Bestwick: The Feast of all Souls
Our first entry starts out like a fairly traditional ghost story with a woman buying a new house in the outskirts of Manchester with lots of hints of a haunting. This is against her parent’s wishes, as she is recovering from the loss of a child and has been suffering from depression and related illnesses. Not long after moving into the big house Alice begins to hear and see things, very unfriendly and seemingly dangerous ghosts of very dishevelled looking children. For a spell the reader is unsure whether they are real or not and the novel has atmosphere and a pretty good ghost story seems in the making.

​However, instead The Feast of all Souls heads off into unpredictable areas as Alice experiences weird time shifts which temporally take her back to the same local areas hundreds of years in the past. Ultimately it is a haunted house story with a difference. What you read in the first forty or fifty pages is miles away from where you might expect heading into the final third. If you’ve never read Simon Bestwick I highly recommend him, both The Faceless and the brilliant post-apocalyptic novel Hell’s Ditch are superb reads.

---

Kealan Patrick Burke: Blanky ​

Blanky , the story of a haunted dead child’s blanket, is a tremendously effective novella you’ll devour in and around two to three hours. It horrifically details the destruction of a relationship after a cot-death, this is shocking enough without a supernatural element. The tale is narrated by Stephen, who is recently separated from his wife Lexi, as is no longer able to live in a house full of memories of where she lost her nine-month-old child.
​
Whilst drunk, he hears a weird thumping noise coming from her upstairs bedroom, he finds himself in her room and sees a blanket lying on the ground near the window. Realising it was Robin’s blanket, her favourite blanket, in his drunken stupor it gives him an excuse to phone his estranged wife. He tells her he has found “blanky” which she thought was lost. After reconnecting with his wife there are some terrific scenes of dread, some of which are particularly cinematic and strangely unsettling. Once Blanky gets going, it really picks up pace and tension quickly, with a few gripping set pieces, which develop into a powerful character driven story motivated by grief. Patrick Kealan-Burke is an absolute master of novella length fiction, of which Sour Candy is another personal favourite of mine. Another claim to fame is that he hails from the same small Irish town as my sister-in-law Sarah! 

---

Billy & Richard Chizmar: Widow’s Point
​
For our next haunting we head to an isolated lighthouse. For decades, tales of weird disappearances, suicide and murder have been linked to the lighthouse at Harper’s Cove to the extent that locals give it a wide berth and it attracts nothing but loonies, the curious and ghost hunters to its dangerous ragged Canadian cliff tops. This terrifically atmospheric novella picks up the story when the lighthouse has been vacant for thirty years, and Thomas Livingston is a bestselling author who investigates supernatural occurrences, negotiates a brief three-night stay in the lighthouse whilst he documents what he experiences. Armed with only a video camera and audio recorder, Thomas can see gold at the end of the rainbow if only he can survive until Monday. 

Cleverly, like a found footage film, the reader must fill in many of the gaps, as the transcript can only answer so many questions and that is part of the fun. Richard and Billy Chizmar have created a highly effective ghost story which even the most jaded supernatural freaks will happily enjoy spending a few hours in the company of.  I won’t forget the spiral staircase which links the bottom of the lighthouse with the living quarters at the top, which go on, and on, and on, and on, and on….

---

Andrew Cull: Knock and You Will See Me
​
Coming in at a sleek 77 pages, Knock and You Will See Me is a perfectly rounded novella which I enjoyed tremendously, wholeheartedly recommending it to fans of old-fashioned hauntings from beyond the grave. The story is told in the first person by Ellie Ray, who reveals she has a weird type of sixth sense, there is also a whiff of an unreliable narrator. This gift, or whatever it is, was never fully discussed with her family and deep-down Ellie realises her middle son Max has inherited her strange ability of just knowing stuff he just shouldn’t.

The novella opens several months after Ellie has buried her father and whilst continues to grieve she believes she is receiving messages from beyond the grave. For the reader, the plot is a convincing balancing act between a potentially unreliable narrator and the escalation of truly freaky supernatural occurrences. A few pages into the story she begins to find crumpled pieces of paper which initially have single words written on them: “WHY” and then in a second note “DID YOU LEAVE ME HERE” and as they continue Ellie’s fragile state begins to fracture. This story was outstanding to the final page and offers much to enjoy. Andrew Cull is one of my top tips for the next couple of years, and I highly recommend his short story collection Bones which has Knock and You Will See Me as its final story.

---

John Hunt: The Tracker
I know nothing of this author except that he has written two outstanding novels, this and a non-supernatural horror called Doll House which is another must read and totally terrifying for other reasons. The Tracker is about as unpleasant as personal hauntings can possibly get, the entity in this makes Freddie Kreuger look like a right wuss. In sporadic moments there are flashes of eye-opening violence, and right from the start I would like to say that I never want to hear mention of bolt-cutters, a live rat and a bucket in the same sentence again, which occurs in a torture scene near the end.
​
The novel opens with a guy called Taylor walking into a police station to hand himself over to the law, as he knows the police are hunting him. During his interrogation it is revealed he is the chief suspect for four brutal murders. Much of the first half of the book is told via the interrogation between detective Owen and prime suspect Taylor, who claims he did not commit the grisly killings. The book then enters flash-back mode and Taylor’s retelling begins right after the recent death of his mother when a sinister shadow begins to stalk him. Once the shadow takes form a terrifying game of cat and mouse between this supernatural being and Taylor takes centre stage. I thought I knew where the second stanza was heading but was completely wrong footed. It’s neither deep, long, or over-complicated and in its 182 pages throws the kitchen sink at the bruised reader with plenty of fun twists along the way. Brutally violent pulp horror at its finest.

---

Jonathan Janz: The Siren and the Spectre

Jonathan Janz’s The Siren and the Spectre is the newest entry, and just recently published, of the thirteen tales and like several others starts in familiar haunted house territory. Soon, however, it bobs, weaves, sneaks, and twists in a variety of highly unpredictable directions which are drip fed to the reader in an excellently paced plot. The novel is seen from the point of view of a celebrated sceptic of the spooky kind, David Crane, an academic who has written numerous books debunking the phenomenon of haunted houses. In the opening stages we find out David has agreed to spend a month in the Alexander House, which has recently been bought by one of his oldest friends and his wife. From this familiar starting point Jonathan Janz soon turns up the heat in a complex and compelling novel.
​
For a good 75% the novel leads you on a merry dance of whether something otherworldly is going on at all and this works exceptionally well. Whether the supernatural is at work or not, David’s past certainly comes back to haunt him in the shape of a couple of second half plot shifts. You could argue that The Siren and the Spectre is much more restrained than many of Janz’s other novels, but the strait-jacket certainly comes off in the final sections. This is a very clever ghost story, but its real strength are the convincing plots the author builds upon familiar haunting elements.

---

Rae Louise: The Fear ​

I would probably have never picked up Rae Louise’s startling suburban haunted house novel The Fear if it had not been recommended by Reagan Rothe who runs the publishing house Black Rose Writing. After all, they gave us The Tracker which also on this list, so I was going to take any tip of his very seriously, and how right he was! Strapped for cash, Mia moves into the house previously owned by her recently deceased uncle with her younger sister, seventeen-year-old Jamie, and her own young daughter Louisa. This is supposed to be a fresh start for the family, but right from the start there is tension in the family dynamics which shape the progression of the novel. On one level it’s a haunted house story, but on the second it’s a family drama. Both are great, mixed together are terrific.
​
Things start going bump in the night quickly, but what makes this story different from most ghost stories of this type is the sheer ordinariness of it all. It’s a quiet street, not much going on, nosy neighbours and a bog-standard house. Before long Louise begins to be disturbed, thinks she is being watched in her sleep and starts wetting the bed. Teenage Jamie is also graphically targeted by the entity in some very powerful sexual scenes and soon things really spiral out of control. Rae Louise shows that great haunted house novels don’t need to be set in windswept mansions, dark lighthouses or cabins hidden in the forest, they can be equally effective in an English council house which you or I could be living in.

---

Grahame Masterton: Ghost Virus

Down the years the legendary Scotsman Graeme Masterton has written many crazy horror novels, however, this has to be the first one featuring haunted clothing… Yes, you read that right, clothing that leads to violent possession and death in this bruiser of a page-turner.  It’s stupid, bloody, crazily over the top, but it also flows incredibly well into a narrative which is the perfect blend of horror, crime and a mysterious ingredient concocted by the author which makes it all hang together perfectly.

The two central characters are detectives Pardow and Patel who investigate a seemingly random collection of murders in south London which soon heads into the realms of the supernatural. The author throws in some terrifically gruesome and shocking kill scenes, including a primary school throwing kids out an upper floor window, a guy gets nails hammered into his eyes (and then disembowelled) for snoring, a little girl eats her dog and a guy gets his arms and legs twisted off whilst walking home after a night on the town.
​
Ghost Virus is loaded with a full tank of horrors, ranging from the insidious paranoia when the supernatural infection begins to creep upon various characters, to the full-blown adrenalin fear rush of killer conclusion. I agree 100%, the thought of being attacked by a killer cardigan sounds dumb beyond belief, but in the hand of Graeme Masterton anything is possible.

---

Willie Meikle: The Ghost Club

From one great Scot to another, Willie Meikle’s The Ghost Club is arguably the most original entry in this selection and it’s top heavy with all sorts of weird and wonderful hauntings. At first glance it looks like a collection of Victorian era ghost stories written by the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain, the sort of thing you could pick up for free on your Kindle. However, upon closer inspection it is so much more…. Over the years I’ve read a fair bit of Robert Louis Stevenson and particularly enjoyed some of his shorter fiction, such as the supernatural classic ‘The Bottle Imp’ and so I started with his entry ‘Wee Davie Makes a Friend’ which I had, rather surprisingly, never previously heard of and could find no trace of on Google. That’s the fun of it, you’ll find no trace of any of the fourteen of the featured tales on any search engine, as they are all new creations of Willie Meikle written in the style of these legendary fourteen authors. A pretty neat idea which is executed beautifully.
​
I’m not an expert on the authors Meikle has fun toying with but have read enough Victorian-era ghost stories to appreciate the difficulty in producing such authentic recreations. The diversity of styles is particularly impressive; for instance, the 100% accurate reimagining of Bram Stoker is a real beauty. Meikle playfully manipulates multiple styles, has sly references to real stories and has created a work which comes across as genuinely authentic. Hopefully it will entice readers back to a key period in the development of the horror story of which the author is obviously both very knowledgeable and a fan of.

---

Adam Nevill: Under a Watchful Eye

There is no finer writer of supernatural horror in the UK than Adam Nevill, and this list is much richer with the inclusion of his frightening brand of hauntings. Sebastian is a horror author who has found relative success in early middle age after years of struggling, scrimping and saving and now lives a peaceful life on the south coast of England. His orderly life is shattered when he sees visions of someone he quickly realises is an unwelcome blast from his past (and bizarrely the feature of a Nevill short story). He had hoped never to see this individual again and before long the visions intensify and become more threatening. His girlfriend deserts him and the feelings of both being watched and stalked get stronger and more vivid. The plot is a particular sneaky one, which cleverly shrouds which supernatural direction it is going to take.    
​
The second half of Under a Watchful Eye has a great change of pace as we leave the seaside and Seb begins to further his research and is unknowingly sucked into a spider’s web of horrors. The otherworldly descriptions are outstanding and we catch a glimpse of what might be waiting for us beyond death. This terrific novel has a combination of both personal hauntings, some outstanding sequences in both a haunted house and a train. Don’t forget to keep your eyes peeled for a truly outstanding ending. Nevill has written many superb novels, including No One Gets Out Alive which must rank as both the most intense and gruelling haunted house novels of the last decade.

---

Mary SanGiovanni: Behind the Door

Behind the Door features a rather different kind of haunting… The isolated Zarepath town has a secret: deep in the forest there is a door which magically grants wishes. If you deliver a handwritten letter to the door asking for some emotional burden to be lifted, your wish will be granted. The guidelines are passed from person to person: your letter must be sealed with a mixture of wax and your blood, then it must be slid beneath the door; you then wait for three days and pray your wish is answered for better or worse. However, you have to be very, very careful how you word your letter, otherwise the door has a way of warping your wish, such as in classic “Monkey’s Paw” short story. For example, we’re told of a local couple who lost two sons in the Vietnam War. Wishing for them to be brought back to life, two mangled shambling corpses turn up at their doorstep.
​
Where’s the haunting angle you may ask? Someone breaks the rules and before long many long-standing wishes are revoked leading to all sorts of unsettling personal hauntings and worse. “Behind the Door” is the first in a projected new series featuring Kathy Ryan is an occult crime specialist who police forces contact for help with weird or wacky goings on; everything from the suspected supernatural to ritualistic murders. SanGiovanni has created a clever tale which makes excellent use of the age-old moral code: “Be careful what you wish for”. I look forward to the return of Kathy Ryan in another outing.

---

Scott Thomas: Kill Creek

The debut novel of Scott Thomas Kill Creek made a deserved big splash and at first glance could be regarded as yet another haunted house story. Readers, however, quickly realise this is a classy novel which cleverly manipulates a time-spanning tale of four suckered horror authors conned into spending the weekend in a notoriously haunted house, which is being streamed live on the internet.  In some ways this is the oldest cliché in the horror book; spending a night in a haunted house. However, the author really spices it up, as what follows is a slow burner which builds wonderfully over the duration of this long novel. In actual-fact, very little of the story takes place in the house, but it casts a long and dangerous shadow as the four authors find out to their peril.
​
Although Kill Creek borrows from classics such as The Haunting of Hill House I really liked the way the author avoided other stereotypical haunted stuff; there are no creaking staircases or branches clicking against tree windows, instead there is intense paranoia and a complex haunting story which is a thrilling read. Many of us must have thought the haunted house novel was as played out as the zombie story, but Scott Thomas shows there is still life in the old dog yet.

---

Tony Tremblay: Moore House

Tony Tremblay’s Moore House turns the old-fashioned haunted house tale into a very fresh and convincing horror novel with dysfunctional priests, lesbian nuns and powerful demons. This guy knows the genre inside out, so enjoy the ride, as once you’re in the house there’s no escape.  Moore House of the title is a terrific location, which is vividly described from the outset, and dominates the majority of the book, In many haunted house novels I’ve read or reviewed I’ve quickly become tired of authors reiterating that their setting is “creepy”. The best haunted house stories do not tell the reader creepy things are afoot, the reader feels that mood soaking out of the page through the words. The crackling and foreboding atmosphere which surrounds Moore House does exactly this. There are some outstanding sequences before and after the characters enter the building, and this is considerably more effective than being told something is “creepy”, instead it just naturally is. 

Plot-wise, an exorcist priest leads a paranormal unit of three excommunicated nuns into a haunted house and before long they are up to their necks in nastiness and hallucinations as they encounter a very powerful demon. The problem is the exorcist and nuns have their own secrets which the demon is keen to exploit. And remember, whatever you do, NEVER say the name of the demon out loud, always spell out that bad boy, nobody wants that kind of unwanted attention… whatever you do, don’t say it… don’t even type it…. S*%t that’s done it….. B-E-L-P-H-E-G-O-R
​
Happy Halloween everyone!
Tony Jones

---