Book Review: The Haunted

An, unhappily, married couple head off into the Scottish highlands on a camping trip. When a sudden storm means they are trapped miles from anywhere the bickering between Sue and Martin mixed with a dark presence hanging in the air things turn potentially murderous.

As set ups go this is undeniably spooky, it also has the potential to be a little clichéd too. Thankfully Niki Valentine takes the stuff of humdrum horror and makes it into something truly unsettling.

As solitude prises apart the fissures in their marriage and then, seemingly, their sanity, her characters reveal ever darker motivations. Whether this is due to the presence of some supernatural agency or the awful truth that the further you are away from anywhere the harder it is to escape from who you really are is kept pleasingly ambiguous.

Any horror novel will make you jump at least once, a good one maybe two or three times; a truly exceptional horror novel though does all that and prompts its readers to ask themselves some troubling questions. The Haunted is just such a book, it richly deserves to be liberated from the genre ghetto and find a wider readership.