WINNER OF THE 2015 BRAM STOKER AWARD FOR SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN A NOVEL A chilling thriller that brilliantly blends psychological suspense and supernatural horror, reminiscent of Stephen King's The Shining, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill ...

When the conversation started, the room was split even between likes, mehs, and dislikes about this very self-aware story of a family's experience with a horror reality show and the question of whether the older sister was possessed or crazy. Some people found the book scary and compelling; others thought it was not scary at all. Almost all of us liked the post-modern touches; we thought the blog were the narrator Merry (under an alias) critiques the reality show she was on as a child was compelling and true, and we liked that the story was aware of and in conversation with typical possession tropes from other media. Much of the debate was to be expected given the plot of the book - was the older sister Marjorie possessed or just mentally disturbed? But David rocked the conversation by pointing us to the end of the book and the description of Merry in the cafe and arguing that Merry was clearly possessed herself, due to the clear chill described in the cafe. We reread that passage, and it was obvious in retrospect that David was right, and that the book was more interesting than we expected. Nonetheless, a few of us still didn't love the book. While the family drama was very real to us, the relationships in the book just made us sad -- Marjorie was clearly mental ill and being tortured by the show, and the dad was a case study in someone who might kill their family, a great element of the story for consistency but not a fun one to read about. And there was the stubborn fact that a few of us didn't find the book scary at all. Some people thought the book worked as horror, but the rest of us were so ready for the bad things to happen that they had no punch. Overall though, no one in the end argued that the novel was bad. It was a good light read with an interesting take on ghost stories, just maybe one that would have been better if it were actually scary.