THE WHISPERINGS

Haunted families find peace.

Seventeen-year-old Joana Guest is used to feeling like an outsider. Her itinerant father, Jack, moves her and her 13-year-old brother, Peter, around the cities and towns of Vermont, staying in each place for just a short time before they pick up and go again. Jack is plagued by what he calls the Whisperings—voices that only he can hear and that seem to threaten his family. Lured by the prospect of steady handyman work for Jack, the small family moves into the basement of a decrepit Victorian mansion in Burlington that’s owned by the slightly batty Mrs. Cracknell. But they soon learn that the house is as infested with ghosts as their own lives are. Joana begins seeing things, including the spirit of her late mother, who was murdered, and after she suffers a head injury, her father’s ability to see and hear the Whisperings transfers to her. The “ta-tump” of Joana’s heartbeat, mimicked by the tapping of the deathwatch beetles living in the walls of the Guests’ new home, is a recurring motif. The family has to unravel the mystery of the house’s violent past, as well as resolve the unfinished business from their own tragedy. The story is marked by an eerie sense of unreality, as hallucinations and dreams interweave with very real danger, and the on-page gore outweighs more emotionally wrought scares. Most characters are cued white.

A spooky tale of family trauma.