There he meets the Mariell family - two brothers, Robert and Simon, their younger sister, Christina, and their aunt, Nanny Tess. On the flip side, it was fun revisiting this novel even if I no longer think it's the greatest haunted house story ever told. The film director Lewis Gilbert (him of James Bond fame no less) later went on to make the film adaptation of `Haunted' in 1995 of the same name.

For just a few, survival is possible only beneath the wrecked streets - if there is time to avoid the slow-descending poisonous ashes.

That's not saying I didn't like it, but it really is a book that depends on its final few pages for the major shock value.

David tells them that he doesn’t want to hear anything about the ghost until he has had a chance to investigate for himself and rule out the more mundane things that are often the cause of “ghost sightings”. It is a novel about how – like the ghosts that haunt Edbrook – the living can also be “frozen in time” by horrifying life events too. It's also set in the late 1980s (when it was first published), so the reader has to make certain concessions for that too.

David begins to perform forensic examinations of the house, trying to detect evidence of paranormal activity. Crickley Hall still plays in my mind now and then and I have such a good memory of this, I don't feel like this book will last as long in my mind, but it will stay a while I feel.

I am starting to think that haunted house stories are just not for me, despite this book doing something different and unique with the standard trope. His best novels, The Rats and The Fog, had the effect of Mike Tyson in his championship days: no finesse, all crude power. Herbert mostly does this by also adding a few hints of the more intense horror fiction of the 1980s to this type of story.Three nights in which David Ash, there to investigate a haunting, will be the victim of horrifying and maleficent games. If a refund or reimbursement is payable to you, we will transfer the money using the same method originally used by you to pay for your purchase. Not only that, this novel also has some of the best pacing that I’ve seen in a long time too 🙂 Not only is this the kind of suspenseful “slow burn” story that gradually gets scarier and scarier before finally exploding into a furiously fast-paced welter of horror movie-style shocks during the dramatic conclusion, but Herbert also does a few clever things with the story’s structure too. David was motivated by the death of Juliet, his twin sister, when they were 11, for which he blames himself.