THE HAUNTING OF OLD SPLINTER

Family issues aren’t all that haunt an English boy after he discovers a dead body behind a wall.

Peter gets along fine with his younger half brother, Adrian, but he has mixed feelings about his stepfather, George. He’s become even more brusque and rigid since beginning renovations on Old Splinter, the long-abandoned mansion where they live in Barghest-on-the-Moor. There turns out to be something to the local belief that the house is cursed, as Peter discovers after finding not only the stinking corpse of its former owner but a spiderlike “wishing claw”—a mummified hand capable of granting any wish before making it go horribly, horribly wrong. Offering mild comic relief before Peter’s ill-considered wishes and their consequences spiral into a frantic, howling climax, the author gives Peter’s loving mother a macabre hobby (doing taxidermy on roadkill) and then has his increasingly terrified characters dig into Adrian’s beloved horror comics for monster-coping strategies. (Research is research, right?) By the end, the bodies and body parts are properly disposed of, and Peter feels like he’s fitting better into his family (after pointed internal musings about “the silence of fathers” who struggle to express their feelings). Readers searching for an out-and-out screamfest will be well satisfied by Mackay’s sophomore novel, but plenty of personal conflicts enrich the tale’s emotional underpinnings too. Peter and his mother are cued white, while George, who’s Asian, is from Hong Kong.

A delicious mix of sensitive domestic troubleshooting and flesh-creeping horror.