Little Sister Death

Gay's terrifying ghost story is a new take on an old tale as the protagonist finds his family falling apart in a haunted farmstead.

What comes to mind when reading this novel - chilling, beautiful, quietly shocking - is The Shining (1977). Both books are about a family's haunting that will lead to the eventual unraveling of the central protector-patriarch.

'The way he injects creeping dread into the narrative is deft and skilled, with sinister sightings and sounds in the walls gradually accumulating ... the final restrained passages are chilling in the extreme, making it a highly accomplished and admirable read.'

'Gay poetically shades together past and present in a novel that eschews outright sensationalism for something much more clever and creepy.'

Inspired by Tennessee's Bell Witch hauntings, this jumps back and forth in time from 1785 to 1982 in a kind of Cormac McCarthy - meets - Stephen King-meets-Blair Witch - sleep destroying way.

'A beautifully written, deeply unsettling haunted house story that lingers with the power of a half-remembered nightmare.'