Holly Horror

Ghosts are even scarier when they look like you.

Troubled, teenaged Evie and her younger brother Stan are unhappy about leaving the big city.  But with Mom out of work and Dad out of the picture, there’s no other choice but to move into Evie’s mother’s childhood home – a huge, creepy old pile on the outskirts of a small western Massachusetts town.  The house is supposedly haunted by the ghost of Holly – a distant cousin - who disappeared under mysterious circumstances 40 years earlier.  

This book jumps right into the spooky action.  On her first day at her home, locals warn Evie about the malevolent old place and she begins having nightmares and other disquieting experiences almost immediately.  What’s worse, Evie’s family is no help.  Her mother buries herself in her new job, Stan begins running with a bad crowd, and her aunt, who lives in town, won’t go near the house.  

There are some cool subplots, too.  The town is situated above an old gold mine, and the tunnels of that mine become a major plot element.  Evie herself is a gifted seamstress and there’s lots of attention paid to fabric and clothing design: Indeed, Evie meets an interesting young man in her high school sewing class. And it turns out that the haunted house is far from Evie’s first brush with the supernatural. 

This book is the first in what promises to be an action-packed series.