 Perhaps the book's greatest strength is how well realised its world is, with some fantastic attention to detail. It's a place where you learn about ghosts in school and just accept them, a kind of parallel Earth that's adapted to allow spectres to exist alongside regular folk There's a kind of unwritten understanding in the UK where, if someone asks you if you're fine, you say “not too bad” or something similar, even if the weevils of despair are burrowing into deep your soul, or you dropped your yoghurt on the bus. So when you see a title like The Perfectly Fine House, you immediately think “yeah, it's not though, is it?” The answer is a definite no. There's another clue in that simple, effective cover by Don Noble too, with a set of grasping hands reaching towards a house on fire. And if you've read anything by Stephen Kozeniewski or Wile E Young before, you'll be expecting richly-realised world-building along with nerve-worrying chills. This is a book that delivers on both counts, and it's chock full of imagination, humour, romance...so much more than the cover and title suggest. The most interesting aspect is how the paranormal is brought into the everyday, bringing to mind The Frighteners, Ghostbusters, or even the bureaucratic afterlife of Beetlejuice. In this world, exorcists are more akin to plumbers than troubled, pea-soup splattered priests. Ghosts in this world enjoy vices like sage and sex, and some humans take advantage of this by visiting ghostly hook-up agencies. It's through one such purveyor of erotic ectoplasmic encounters that we meet the main characters of Donna and her dead twin Kyle, who promises his overworked sister a stress-free vacation in the titular house. Naturally, a non-haunted house in a world where you can pet dead dogs and hold hands (or more) with a spectre is a cause for concern. As the twins struggle to understand the place and its effect on both dead & living souls, relationships are threatened along with all of ghostkind. Perhaps the book's greatest strength is how well realised its world is, with some fantastic attention to detail. It's a place where you learn about ghosts in school and just accept them, a kind of parallel Earth that's adapted to allow spectres to exist alongside regular folk. Disgruntled humans chase away pesky entities with windchimes, or threaten to toss them into salt jail; exorcists treat ley lines like blocked pipes, and instead of being bound to a single place, ghosts travel by popping in and out of existence, teleporting themselves wherever they like. Because it's all handled so matter-of-factly, it's easy to get on board with the idea early on without the concept having to be over-explained. Everything just fits. Another strength is how becoming a ghost is taken for granted, a safety net of sorts for the living. Because the spirits here are somewhat tangible, if a little squishy, and visible to basically anybody, nobody seems to feel a true sense of loss, or concern about heart attacks and the like. Until the perfectly fine house starts claiming victims, that is. When the dead start to experience true death, it packs a heavy emotional and psychological punch, especially as each ghost is infused with personality instead of just being a cartoonish floating wad of sheets. It's easy to share the ghosts' panic and unease once the threat of eternal non-existence looms, and it's a credit to both authors that a story packed with dead things retains such a strong human core. For my money, any book that can have you feeling existential dread on one page and love of life on the next is definitely worth a purchase.  In an alternate reality where ghosts are as commonplace as the weather, the most terrifying thing imaginable is a house not being haunted. Donna Fitzpatrick runs a surrogacy agency, where ghosts can briefly possess volunteers in order to enjoy carnal pleasures. She's also working herself into an early grave. But that's no big deal because death is no worse than puberty. That's particularly evident in Donna's twin, Kyle, a self-absorbed roustabout who spends most of his time high on sage. Kyle's been in arrested development since his motorcycle accident fifteen years ago. When Donna has a panic attack, Kyle insists she take a vacation at an abandoned mansion. There's just one small problem: there isn't a single ghost in Jackson Manor. And while an unhaunted house seems no worse than an oddity at first, soon ghosts go missing, natural disasters consume entire cities, and every afterlife on earth is threatened by the terrible secret behind . . . THE PERFECTLY FINE HOUSE.   the heart and soul of horror fiction reviewsComments are closed.
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