Ghost stories are sort of a staple with me. I enjoy them when they’re well done, in books as well as DVDs, and I especially enjoy them when it’s dark or overcast outside. There’s something about the mood, the fact that I can almost believe ghosts exist.I sat down with Alexandra Solokoff’s first novel, The Harrowing, and prepared for a fright fest based on the reviews and the creepy cover. I ended up getting a mixed bag of enjoyment.

The plot revolves around five college students left on their own over the long Thanksgiving holidays. Each of them, as it turns out, had his or her reason for not going home. For Robin Stone, the protagonist of the tale, the reason was her drunken mother. During the first 50 pages, we get a good look at each of these characters. Then, with the fall break in full swing, they lose the power to Baird College where they’re in attendance and all the lights go out for the night. I personally really liked the atmosphere of getting locked up in the college and losing power. So far, everything looked good, but it was also too familiar. However, a ghost story has to have a lot of the same earmarks in order to succeed.

However, the group doesn’t stay stymied long. They get the fire in the fireplace going and begin searching for something to do. In short order, to no one’s real surprise, Robin and the others find a Ouija board. I knew then that something was going to happen because this is the point in all the movies where stuff occurs. But the Ouija board was upsetting to a degree. I don’t know how many books I’ve read that have featured those, and there was even a series of B movies based on those devices (Witchboard, etc.)

Even with the red flags firmly in place at this point, I kept reading. Solokoff’s prose style is simple and moves quickly. Those are pluses that keep me turning pages. Unfortunately, the characters never grew past that point. I didn’t get any further revelations of their backgrounds, never saw them make any other deeper or more meaningful connections to each other or the story. They just followed their predestined course to get to the end of the book.

That was satisfying in one regard. I got the ghost story I was looking for. But it was unsatisfying because it didn’t offer anything new. I will admit that some of the Jewish legends that were mixed into the prose were interesting and entertaining, but they didn’t get deep or more fleshed out either. The ending was almost down to paint-by-number, even the final ending, which wasn’t a surprise and was totally expected.

Anyone reading this novel in a single sitting as I did will probably ultimately be satisfied. It’s an entertaining diversion. But if you lay the book down for any time and start thinking about it, or spend time thinking about it after you’ve finished, you’re going to see how thin it is. The plot and the characters are too familiar, and – as the old saying goes – familiarity breeds contempt.

Still, this was probably written more for younger readers who haven’t seen or read a plethora of ghost stories. I think they’ll be more satisfied than I was.

However, I enjoyed the book enough to look for Alexandra Solokoff’s second horror novel, The Price, coming out in hardcover in February 2008.

Chasing the Dead is a sleek bullet of a suspense/horror novel. I know that both of those genres exist independently of each other, but sometimes have elements of the other within them, but this book is first one, then the other in a blend like I haven’t seen before.

I picked the book up because the cover caught my eye. I couldn’t help wondering who was driving that car at night down such a desolate road with the forest all around. From the provocative title, I knew whoever it was couldn’t be out day-tripping – primarily because it’s night. I was also attracted by the brevity of the book. At 250 pages with a generous font instead of tiny type, I knew I could probably get through it in an hour or two. So I added it to the stack I was getting.

At home, still curious, I opened the cover and intended to read a chapter or so just to get the feel of it. I do that a lot and let my subconscious choose the order of the books I read when I don’t have a definite plan.

However, I had definite plans. I’ve got an immense TBR pile. But I read the prologue and remained curious. After all, a prologue doesn’t necessarily tell you how a book is going to read.

On the first page of Chapter 1, I met Susan Young, newly divorced and still not sure why, who’s about to close a major real estate deal, and is just trying to get home to her young daughter through the late-evening traffic. Within six pages, she arrives home and finds her daughter and the nanny aren’t home.

Then she gets the phone call.

The voice of a man she doesn’t know informs her that she has a beautiful daughter, then proceeds to describe her. I was hooked. As a parent, having my child in the hands of a madman would be terrifying.

By the end of the next two chapters, just ten short pages away and I’m suddenly 15% of the way through the novel, Susan is forced to obey the machinations of the evil man who holds the life of her child in his hands.

I was totally stuck at this point. For a first-time author, Schreiber really knows how to keep a reader turning pages. I finally gave up and settled back to just follow the book through to the end. I had no choice. I was held completely in thrall.

In just a few more short chapters, Susan is commanded to dig up a grave. By hand. During the confusion, she inadvertently left the shovel she was told she had to bring. By the time she gets back to her SUV, there’s another body waiting for her that turns her world upside down again.

Schreiber’s story moves relentlessly, till the anticipation becomes an adrenaline-laced blur. The twists and turns come faster and faster, and I can’t really remember when the story jumped from suspense to out-and-out Stephen King style horror because the dread inside me continued to come from the same place. The dread grew larger and larger, though, because what Susan faced seemed to grow exponentially as well.

Although Chasing the Dead isn’t going to change your life or even stay with you long after you finish it, the novel will definitely take you to the darker places of your mind and root around in old fears resurrected from childhood. It’s a fun, fast read that will keep you nailed to the pages as you try to stay up with the whipsaw of obstacles Susan faces as she struggles to save her child.

Now I’ve gotta pick up Schreiber’s new book, Eat the Dead, that just hit the bookshelves. And when I read it, I’m gonna do it at night just for that extra adrenaline spike. I’ll make sure the doors are all locked and the windows are closed first.

Joe Hill is a pseudonym. Most everyone, editors and the book-reading public, know that he’s actually Stephen King’s son. It was never a well-kept secret except when he was doing award-winning short stories. His skill as a writer, a good writer, was a better kept secret because as everyone knows very few short story writers really get a lot of notice. All that changes with the publication of that new writer’s first novel if he or she hits one out of the park.

Joe Hill has done exactly that with his first book. The premise of Heart-Shaped Box is deceptively simple. It sucked me right in. Imagine in this day and age of being able to buy anything and everything on-line that you could buy a ghost. What kind of ghost would you get? A chain-rattler? A friendly ghost?More than likely, you wouldn’t get what you were planning on.  And if the characters had in the novel, the excitement and borrowed fear would never have kicked in.

Even with a premise like this, I wasn’t convinced that Joe Hill, no matter whose son he was, could pull off an entertaining story.  Even with the legacy and the premise, I put off getting the book for a while. And for time, while reading the novel, I wasn’t convinced I’d spent my money wisely. Of course, book readers aren’t so much worried about the money they spend on a book as much as they are the time they spend on a book. I just don’t get that many free evenings to read, and each one is precious to me.

Hill’s prose flows smoothly but he didn’t seem to be going anywhere very fast at the beginning of the book. I got bored from time to time and just wished he would get on with the story.

To make matters worse, I didn’t like his main characters. Judas Coyne, called Jude by his friends, is an aging rock-and-roller whose days on a stage are gone. He’s in his early fifties and has become pretty much a social cripple. He’s not interested in meeting people anymore and he has all the money he needs. The only thing they gets him up in the mornings is his dogs.

But it’s during this early section that I found out how horrible Jude’s life was when he was a child.  How it had shaped him. I understood why he was the way he was, but I still didn’t really care. He didn’t have anything to prove to himself, and he didn’t have anything to prove to me.

It wasn’t until his personal assistant bought the dead man’s suit on eBay that the story really started picking up the pace and getting more interesting. The menace was there, lingering on every page, but not really picking up the momentum for a while.

During this time, the reader also discovers that Jude has a live-in lover that’s half his age and appears to be every bit as emotionally damaged as he is. Jude calls her Georgia, but her name is really Mary Beth. She was a stripper and a band groupie when Jude found her. Their relationship is tempestuous and rocky.

But the ghost of Craddock McDermott quickly terrorizes and unites them. The ghost was the stepfather of another young woman that Jude took as a live-in lover. He called that young woman Florida, but her real name was Anna. What Jude discovers is that Anna slit her wrists in the bathtub and committed suicide after he made her go back home.

Anna’s sister, Jessica, sold the suit on eBay to set the trap for Jude. Jessica and her dead stepfather blame Jude for Anna’s death. Craddock McDermott has come back from the grave for vengeance.

Even with the hook set and knowing that Jude was facing the worst thing that ever happened to him in his life, the interest level for the novel had not peaked for me. It wasn’t until Jude and Mary Beth got on the road and tried to outrun the ghost that things really started get interesting.

At first all the action seemed to be merely rote. The things that Jude did would be expected of anyone trapped in the same fictional situation. However, somewhere in there Jude and Mary Beth came alive to me.

They weren’t merely dysfunctional people anymore. They became people I cared about because they started to care about each other. Once that happened, everything mattered. That change in my opinion is indicative of the level of writing that Joe Hill is capable of.

As a young writer I think he deliberately gave his readers characters they wouldn’t care about, people that most readers with felt were unworthy of the time they spend with them, just so he could redeem them. He twisted all those views and those negative feelings into something strong and passionate. That’s the writer’s gift, and is probably what Hill picked up from the best of his father’s books.

Heart-Shaped Box makes a lot of familiar moves to confirmed horror readers. But that’s the author just making sense within the fictional story. The writing may feel a trifle overdone, but Hill’s prose builds atmosphere and narrative tension in the latter half of the book that makes the story just sing along at a frenetic pace.

If Hill hadn’t taken the time with the characters in the first half of the book, I wouldn’t have cared as deeply about them by the end. Too many times writers depend on action to carry a story forward. Hill depends on characters to carry the story forward.

If you’re one of the readers that bought the book expecting Stephen King, then put the book down and didn’t finish it, I really advise you to go back and put the time in to at least read a little while longer. You’ll be rewarded for the time and effort.

Although the book could be considered beach material, I think you’ll find the beach will seem a little more desolate and a little more chilly while you’re turning pages. And if you make the mistake of staying up late to finish this novel, you might use find yourself reading while pulling the covers up to your chin and sleeping with the light on well after you’re done.

I’m looking forward to Joe Hill’s next book. As it is now, I’m going back and picking up some of his short story collections. This is definitely a young new writer to watch. 

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Tess Gerritsen’s mystery/thriller series about Detective Jane Rizzoli and Dr. Maura Isles keeps hitting the bestseller lists, and deservedly so.  As a former internist (she started writing full-time once she started hitting those bestseller lists), Gerritsen’s medical knowledge is first-rate and is always interesting.

Previous books include The Surgeon, The Apprentice, The Sinner, Body Double, and Vanish. The on-going relationship between the two protagonists, Rizzoli and Isles, is what draws me back to the series time after time.  The women are both strong and independent in same but different ways, and they’re equally vulnerable on separate fronts.

Rizzoli is a hardnosed, no-nonsense cop that goes for the throat of any problem placed before her.  She takes no prisoners.  She also has a very black-and-white view of the world that Dr. Isles doesn’t necessarily agree with in every instance.  In The Mephisto Club, Jane is happily married and has a baby.  Fans who have followed the series have seen all those additions to Rizzoli’s life take place during the course of the series.

Dr. Isles is the coroner of the team.  Where Rizzoli grills suspects and stays after them till she catches the first lie and breaks the investigation open, Dr. Isles solicits answers from the dead during autopsies.  Dr. Isles has gone through a bitter divorce (fans have even gotten to meet the ex and form their own opinions of the guy) and now finds herself in love with a priest, Father Daniel Brophy.  Up until this book, Brophy and Dr. Isles have teetered on the edge of having a relationship, something that neither one of them might survive in their respective job fields.  Or emotionally.  And Rizzoli definitely wouldn’t support such an liaison because of her friendship with Dr. Isles and her church upbringing.

Rizzoli and Dr. Isles get called out to a crime scene where a young woman named Lori Ann Tucker has been violently murdered.  Even seasoned homicide investigators get shocked by the macabre nature of the murder.

While Rizzoli is there, Dr. Isles arrives and takes custody of the body, which has been subjected to amputations of the head and hand.  Satanic symbols, upside down crosses, and a Latin phrase, “Peccavi”, written on the wall fill the apartment.  It doesn’t take long for whispers of a ritualistic murder to start up.

Back at the lab, Dr. Isles processes the body, making the chilling discovery of the fact that one of the hands recovered at the scene doesn’t belong to the murder victim.  Somewhere out there, another young woman lies dead or has been horribly maimed.

Following up on the leads, Rizzoli quickly comes into contact with The Mephisto Foundation.  They claim to be an organization dedicated to finding and destroying demons.  Rizzoli doesn’t believe in demons, though, and isn’t exactly enamored of the foundation’s wealthy and influential leader, Anthony Sansone.  Sansone makes no bones about it:  he definitely believes in demons, and claims to be descended from one.

The novel crashes through chapters, involving more murders and deliberate clues left by the murderer.  A female police detective is murdered next, followed by another death, this one hitting closer to home for Rizzoli and Dr. Isles.  As the suspense ratchets up, so does the uncertainty about things that go bump in the night.

The Mephisto Club  flirts with the line between suspense and supernatural. Part of the action leaps over to Lily, a young woman who’s spent the last twelve years running from a demon.  Her life is harsh and stark, and the reader instantly feels sympathetic toward her.

In the midst of the investigation and the murders, though, it’s the human stories about the two protagonists that really take center stage.  Dr. Isles’s maybe relationship with Father Brophy reaches a sudden and irrevocable climax, and Rizzoli’s parents split up, totally blowing Rizzoli’s world and her sense of how things are supposed to be.

When Rizzoli finds out what has happened between Dr. Isles and Father Brophy, then tension between the two women becomes sharp and wicked.  They’ve been together through so many emotional things as well as danger mixed in with their investigations that it seemed nothing would tear them apart.  But this could be the one thing that will. Gerritsen’s writing is amazing as usual.  She propels her readers through the story with an accustomed ease.  She adds layers to the characters in quickly drawn scenes, and shows that Rizzoli and Dr. Isles live in the same real world we inhabit, and that their problems aren’t that far removed from ours.

In this book, Gerritsen also gets to use some of her personal interests in archeology, history, and religion as she leavens her crime story with all of these things.  She trots out a lot of information, but you never trip over it as you read, and it advances the story in twisted ways that made me start wondering what was truly going on.  Suddenly there was more going on than just the mystery of who was committing the murders.

The novel is set in Boston.  The city comes alive as Rizzoli and Dr. Isles move through it.  But Gerritsen also brings Italy to life through Lily, the young girl on the run for her life.  The basilica beneath Rome in particular caught my attention because, as Gerritsen points out, it was used in one of the Indiana Jones movies.  It’s a perfectly creepy place, and the secrets that Gerritsen reveals through Lily ring true.  It makes me want to go see it for myself.

Although The Mephisto Club stands well enough on its own, I’d really encourage readers to begin reading the earlier books first.  If you haven’t read Gerritsen before, I think you’ll be back.  Reading this book first takes away some of the twists and turns of the earlier novels that really pack a punch.  Even if you think you’re just interested in the supernatural/historical/Da Vinci-like puzzle, I think you’re going to come back to the series.  Even so, you’ll enjoy the other books anyway.

Gerritsen is a gifted writer, one who likes to get it right, and she moves a story along at a breakneck pace.  She also provides a Reader’s Guide and a Historical Background on her webpage at www.tessgerritsen.com.

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Scott Smith’s new book is a gut-churner of the first-degree.  The novel starts out slow and builds, introducing the reader to each of the four characters.  Eric is the party guy who has settled into his future, planning on marrying Stacy, teaching school and being a high school sports coach.  Stacy is okay with her lot in life, but she’s still sowing a few wild oats when Eric’s not looking – but only up to a point.  Jeff is a survivor, a guy who always has a plan no matter what the situation.  Amy tends to be selfish and needy, a good person in a good situation, but this group left “good situation” back at the edge of the jungle.

While vacationing in Cancun, the four meet Mathias, a young German man who is also vacationing on theYucatan Peninsula.  But he’s there with his brother.  While they talk, Mathias tells everyone he’s worried about his brother, who started crushing on a young female archeologist and ended up going on a dig with the team into the interior of the forest.  Taken with Mathias’s plight, they pack up and go with him to search for the missing brother.  Also along for the trip, packing plenty of tequila, is a Greek man who calls himself Pablo.

Unfortunately, the nature of the novel precludes talking about the plot much beyond this point.  The reader really needs to experience it first hand.  Suffice to say that pleasant things are not encountered out in the wilds of the jungle.

Scott Smith, author of A Simple Plan, a novel that came out thirteen years ago, struck gold with his first book.  He also went on to write the screenplay, which featured Bill Paxton, Bridget Fonda, and Billy Bob Thornton.  Smith may take time between projects, but he scores big when he plays. I meandered through the first fifty pages or so.  Smith took time to set up the characters and establish their relationships with each other.  But it was easy to put the book down and go off to other things.  However, once our heroes entered the jungle, ran across the mysterious Mayan village with people that ignored them, then finally found the archeological dig site – which someone had tried to hide from them – I was white-knuckled and nailed to the pages.

Smith handles the suspense with a deft hand, ratcheting up the stakes like a skilled master.  It’s no wonder that Stephen King went on at length about this book.  When they find out that someone hid the dig site from them, warning bells started going off in my head.  But their reason for going ahead with the search was well done:  they were looking for Mathias’s brother, and if no one was around when someone should have been, it became even more important to find him.  When Jeff noticed that no living thing was in the area, not even flies, the weirdness level blossomed.  By that time the group had an injured party and were ready to leave.  Unfortunately, that option was no longer in play.  They were trapped.

Several reviewers seem to complain about the lack of explanation for some things, and some even say there’s a certain shallowness to the characters.  My argument is this:  Smith isn’t selling explanations here; he’s selling entertainment.  In this case, he’s selling horror, and there’s plenty of it here.  In the case of the characters, he’s writing about realistic people, not superheroes or spies or even – really – heroes at all.  They’re just people, and they come across that way.

It’s a foregone conclusion that The Ruins will become a movie.  The only question is when. Pick up the book if you like horror or suspense, because The Ruins is actually equal parts of both.

Stephen King fans will eat this one up.  Just make sure you leave yourself plenty of time to finish the book once you start it.  And you may want to leave the lights on afterwards as well.  And that cute little ivy plant that seems determined to take over your house?  Well, you just might not feel the same way about it!