By sheer coincidence, my Books of Horror Go To List pick for October is the book that just won the inaugural Books of Horror Indie Brawl, a bracketed tournament voted on by the legions of fans in a thriving Facebook group. It was up against it, having to take on 'Stolen Tongues' by Felix Blackwell, the book I thought would win, in the semi-final, and then Duncan Ralston's 'Ghostland' in the final, but it won out, suddenly making me look opportunistic in the process. In reality, I set up a registry on Amazon for family members to pick and choose books for my birthday and Christmas presents, and I've been working through what they bought me in a varied order.

So to 'The Exorcist's House'. It's a relatively straightforward read with a small cast and primarily a single setting, but it's also a smooth read that takes those potential limitations and turns them to positive use, building character even more than setpiece horror scenes. The result is an inveterate pageturner in which characters we care about are placed into harm's way and we root for them to get out of the novel alive. I'm not going to tell you if they do or not.

The core cast are the Hills, but we meet Old Man Merle first; Merle Blatty, with that homage of a surname the cheapest thing about the book, an overt nod to William Peter Blatty who wrote 'The Exorcist'. Merle is given the prologue to set the stage, battling a demonic presence occupying his farmhouse in West Virginia. It didn't kill his son, who died young after being bitten by a snake, but it took his wife, Gertie, and it's about to take him too, exorcist or not, enticing him into a room and then burning it down around him. So much for the powers of this exorcist.

Enter the Hills, a family of three that's soon to be four. They live in Ohio, where Daniel works as a psychologist and Nora as a teacher. Their daughter Alice, almost sixteen years old, is soon to find herself a big sister. In the meantime, they buy the exorcist's house cheap, planning to do it up and flip it. A chemical plant is coming to the area and it'll boost property prices, so it seems like a deal too good to pass on. And, until it's ready to sell, they'll move down there and live in it themselves.

The first death in the book is Merle's but a second follows quickly enough, when Carmine, the lead contractor repairing the fire damage to the house, carves out his eyes with bottle glass in a hotel room because he's seen something that he can't unsee. It's a good way to start and, while that's it for death for a while, what with so few characters to chip away at, it's certainly not it for the book. After all, the basement quietly awaits the Hills, behind a cross of nails, with a hidden room and its deep well that leads to who knows where, boarded up with crucifixes and rosaries protecting it.

So, what do you think happens? It's fair to say that we might be able to guess at most of what goes down from that point on, but it's also fair to say that we wouldn't be able to write it as well as Nick Roberts, who really gets into the skin of the Hills and makes us care about them. I appreciated the fact that none of them are perfect but I also appreciated that the obvious telegraphing of certain plot elements was neatly subverted by not exploiting them in the way we expect. Sure, their little secrets come out, because a powerful demonic entity will always see those as weapons but they're not the cheap and obvious pops that we probably think they'll turn out to be. Roberts is too clever to be that obvious.

There are other characters in the book, but few of them. Most obviously there's Luke Simmons, a boy who lives nearby and used to mow Merle's lawn; he takes up that job again for the Hills, and in the process becomes a love interest for Alice, who has no other kids around her to be involved in a coming of age story. There's also Buck, Merle's bloodhound who he wisely sent away from home as his battle with the demon got serious, and who returns later to be taken in by the Hills. Both play important parts in the story, as do a couple of minor characters who are wisely not given the depth of character that the principals are treated to.

The biggest success of the book is probably Roberts making us care. His smooth prose is certainly up there too, because it's engaging and keeps us turning pages, especially when he ends chapters at points we're not ready to leave the book on. This is definitely a book to keep you up at night. It's a decent length at two hundred and seventy pages but it doesn't seem anywhere near that long, because we practically rush through it with a palpable feeling of urgency. However, smooth prose doesn't make a good book; it just helps. It's the characters who make this one, because Roberts is able to make us feel for them, even when they don't do things the way we might.

If all that sounds like a family drama rather than a horror novel, I should emphasise that it's only ever a horror novel, with a number of setpiece scenes that would easily translate into a cinematic approach. If memory serves, this may have been optioned for a feature. If not, it really should be, because it would make a good horror movie, especially if done as a reasonably budgeted indie, as its origin warrants. Hollywood would mess this up, but a capable indie film director with enough financing to find the right location, build the right sets and get those setpiece scenes right could do a magnificent job.

Roberts is a relatively new author, with only two novels and a short story collection to his name at this juncture. When I compiled, with the Books of Horror regulars, the Go To List of the books that are mentioned all the time in that group, for good or bad, it was a tough choice as to whether this book or its predecessor, 'Anathema', with the memorably grasping hand on its cover, should be the Nick Roberts pick. This won out and its inclusion in the Indie Brawl backs that choice up, but, right now, the average rating for 'Anathema' at Goodreads is only a hundredth of a point behind this. I should clearly read that one too. And, I'm guessing, so should you. ~~ Hal C F Astell