Rate this book

English Ghost Story (2014)

by Kim Newman(Favorite Author)

3.2 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1322131597 (ISBN13: 9781322131597)

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Titan Publishing Company

review 1: I gave up on this. It started promisingly enough and, as I'm always on the lookout for a good ghost story, I continued to give it the benefit of them doubt for some time. But by the time I'd got just over half way through, I'd become irritated by the style and by the lack of psychological depth in the main characters of what is, to all intents and purposes, a psychodrama. There are precious few novel length ghost stories that really work (The Woman in Black is the only one I can think of) and I've come to the conclusion that the genre is generally only successful in the short story form.
review 2: I've been a Kim Newman fan since "Jago" in the early 90s, and its great that he's finally back to writing horror novels after such a long break (I still haven't read ... more"Johnny Alucard," but I'm chomping at the bit to get to it). "An English Ghost Story" didn't disappoint. It's at once a great, almost classic ghost story in the M.R. James mold, but Newman infuses it with enough of his batsh*t weirdo sensibility to make it utterly its own thing. There's a minor rough patch in the middle where the shift toward horror feels rushed and the characters start behaving in odd ways that feel a bit unmotivated until the reasons are finally revealed toward the end. These are minor quibbles, however. The characters are great, the eeriness persists throughout and there are a few passages that are truly terrifying. I'm not ashamed to admit this book gave me a nasty flurry of nightmares the other night.I do wish it had some of the scope of "Jago" or some of Newman's other works, and there are a few loose ends (like Kirsty's relationship with Vron) that I didn't feel like were entirely satisfactorily explored. But overall this is the scariest and most precisely crafted haunted-house novel I've read in a very long time. less

Download links for: English Ghost Story

Advertising