the reader of books

Wow, why all the hate, people? I will admit, this was minimally scary and the writing is average at best, but it was just suspenseful enough and gore-free. Plus, I liked its vague, old-fashioned setting -- descriptions of a Victorian-esque Christmas, meals consisting of roasted meats and pies, old curmudgeonly lawyers who hate using those newfangled telephones, bustling market days. I love it.

Obviously, while reading, I imagined Harry Potter and me sitting around a campfire, telling ghost stories and eating s'mores. Harry / Arthur is a young lawyer sent to sort out the papers of a recently deceased client at her residence, Eel Marsh House. Harry / Arthur keeps getting hints from the locals that not all is right at Eel Marsh House, but he brushes it off as a load of bunkum. Mysterious happenings cause him to reassess that opinion. Also, he gets a dog. The animals always know.

Perhaps people who enjoy truly scary ghost stories would find this rather lame and anticlimactic, but I used to watch Are You Afraid of the Dark muted with closed captioning when it was still day light, so make of that what you will.