Review: Haunted by William Hussey

Milton Lake is a seemingly ordinary town, where tales of hauntings and strange goings on ripple beneath the surface.

When a mysterious boy comes to town and moves into a large, derelict house, all alone, his arrival changes everything. Shrouded in secrecy, he senses a kindred spirit in Emma Rhodes, and reveals to her a shocking truth. Someone in Milton Lake is using the fabled Ghost Machine to call the spirits of the dead back to our world.

Now it is up to these two lost souls to find out who is operating the strange invention before it is too late . . . 

For call by call, the dead will be unleashed.

Teen Emma Rhodes is carrying a great deal of baggage as she blames herself for the death of her younger brother some time earlier, a tragic event that went on to tear her family apart. She still lives with her father in Milton Lake, but her mother is no longer on the scene. Milton Lake itself has its own tragic past - some years earlier one of its residents massacred a number of people at the town's amusement park that he owned before ending his own life.

As part of a 'gang' initiation rite, a friend of Emma's enters said amusement park, and is carried out in pretty much a catatonic state. It seems as if something evil has arrived in Milton Lake, summoned by a mysterious machine that can be used to open the gates for desperate spirits to re-enter our world in the search of new hosts so that they can live again. It is down to Emma and Nick, the mysterious new kid in town, to find out who has got their hands on this machine before too many spirits cross over and take the lives of Milton Lake's residents.

Anybody who has been following this blog for some time will know that I am a huge fan if William Hussey's Witchfinder trilogy. I have therefore been champing at the bit to read this ever since I last met William at an event and he gave me a basic idea of what the story was about.

I never read much horror before starting this blog, only occasionally dipping my toes in those waters, but over the past few years horror as probably become my favourite genre within YA fiction, and lovers of this genre  pretty much spoiled for choice these days. Love gore? Try Darren Shan or Charlie Higson. Heart-stopping action horror? Go for Will Hill or Alexander Gordon Smith. Spooky, psychological thrills more your thing? William Hussey's Haunted is more than worth your time. I took it to Prague with me when my wife and I visited the city for a few days in the summer, and there was many a moment when she would be impatiently tapping her foot or tutting, desperate for me to put the book down and venture outside to see the sights. And putting it down was something of a challenge as I was hooked from beginning to end.

Of course, if you are a gore fan then you should not simply dismiss this book - if you have read any of William's previous books you will know that he likes to include a bit of the old red stuff (case in point - look what happened to poor Jake Harker's mother in the first Witchfinder book), and there are a number of these moments splattered throughout Haunted. However, it's main strength is very much its sheer creepiness, and its ability to make your skin crawl with terror.

As was the case with William's previous books, Haunted is very well written, with the plot perfectly paced to keep teen readers turning the pages. There are also the requisite plot twists that all good stories like this should have, and although I do pride myself on my ability to work out twists in books, there were enough in Haunted to keep me guessing right up until the final denouement. 

The main characters of Emma and Nick are very likeable, although it did take me while to gel with them. I think this was because of the way in which the author developed them as the story progressed, by drip feeding little bits of information and hints about their troubled pasts, and it is only when they are slap bang in the thick of the action, with their lives at risk, that we truly start to empathise with them and fear for their safety. In fact, by the end we are on something of an emotional roller coaster ride, but to say any more about that would create spoilers. The supporting cast are somewhat B-movie-ish (made up term), adding to that overall sense of creepiness that pervades throughout the story.

Haunted was published by OUP (thank you for my copy, generous publisher people) at the beginning of September, and if you love YA horror then it is a must-add for your collection.

Coming Up in 2013: Haunted by William Hussey (and exclusive cover reveal)

Back in January I ran my annual 'Coming Up In...' feature. At the time, Witchfinder author William Hussey expressed an interest in taking part, but he really wanted to wait until the book cover had been finalised by the lovely people at OUP. Naturally, as a lover of William's Witchfinder series, I was desperate to find out more about his new book, Haunted, and so I have been waiting patiently for the moment to arrive. 

And now it is here, and not only do I have the honour of hosting a fantastic guest post by William, but also the very first public reveal of the book cover for Haunted (so remember where you saw it first). It is a little different from most of the YA covers around at the moment, and I totally love it! Rohan Eason's illustrations are so incredibly spooky, and I could stare at the image for hours (and as the book isn't due to be published until September I'm just going to have to make do with this for the next few months). Make sure you click on the pictures to view the images in all their big sized glory.

And now, over to William:

After completing the Witchfinder trilogy, I was really keen for a new storytelling challenge. Witchfinder had been pretty epic: a story that spanned over a quarter of a million words, virtually every monster in the mythical bestiary, and a timeline that started a moment or two after the Big Bang and reached right up to the present day (by way of the Stone Age and the English Civil War!). Now I wanted to write a story with a tighter focus, a tale that concentrated on a few characters over the course of a week.

A week in which a huge, heart-stopping supernatural drama would be played out…

I’m a great believer that writers should always be challenged by their next project. They ought to step into those early pages of a new book with their hearts lodged firmly in their mouths. ‘Can I really do this?’, ‘Am I good enough to pull it off?’ Those questions should forever be ringing in the writer’s mind.

With HAUNTED I set myself two formidable (for me, at least!) challenges. First, I would tell the tale from the point of view of a sixteen-year-old girl. Up until this point, I’d always written my books from a boy’s perspective; could I really capture an authentic voice for a teenage girl? As I got deeper into the story, I began to realise that I shouldn’t always be conscious of the gender of my hero, Emma Rhodes. What did I know about this character? She was clever, strong-willed, determined, resourceful, grieving, robust and yet sensitive, especially to cruelty and injustice. Those were the things that mattered about her, and they were characteristics I admired and felt able to convey.

At this point I should tell you a little about the story:

Emma Rhodes begins the book in a state of complete isolation. Some months ago, her little brother Richie died while in her care. Since that day Emma has been haunted by grief and guilt, a state which has driven her friends away and left her fragile and alone. Into this lonely world comes a mysterious American – a teenager who moves into the derelict Sparrow House across the street. His arrival changes everything. Shrouded in mystery, he begins to draw Emma out of her isolation by revealing to her a shocking truth. Someone in the little town of Milton Lake is using the fabled ‘Ghost Machine’ to call the spirits of the dead back to our world. Now it is up to these two lost souls to find out who is operating this strange invention before it is too late. For call by call, the hungry dead will be unleashed…

My second challenge was to introduce a ‘celebrity historical cameo’ into the book. The Ghost Machine is an antique telephone from the 1920s, its crackling line a pathway to the world of the ravenous dead. But here’s the thing: the Ghost Machine is based on a true story.

Thomas Edison

In 1920 the world-famous inventor Thomas Edison – the man who developed the light bulb, the movie camera, the telephone and the record player – claimed to the world’s press that he was on the verge of inventing a phone for speaking with the dead! No kidding, he really did! After his death ten years later it was thought that Edison had been pulling one of his famous pranks on a bunch of gullible journalists… but what if he’d been telling the truth?

Why would Edison have covered up such a fabulous invention? What might have caused him such mortal terror that he hid the device from the world? And what if the Ghost Machine was still out there, waiting for some desperate soul to start making calls on it again?

Once I’d hit upon the idea of the Ghost Machine in a modern setting (with Emma battling to discover its whereabouts before it tore her world apart), I knew that Thomas Edison himself must feature in the story. What followed is essential for any writer hoping to recreate a historical setting and personality: LOADS of research. I read four HUGE biographies on Edison, as well as several books on the development of early telephones. Once I’d absorbed all my notes, I was ready to write the chapters in which Edison revisited his famous Menlo Park laboratory and, at dead of night, began his experiments with the Ghost Machine.

Research helped to make this ‘character’ seem real to the reader. I had to recreate the way the Great Man spoke, how he moved, how he thought, how he listened (tricky as Edison was almost stone deaf!). I had set myself this challenge before when writing Witchfinder: Gallows at Twilight, which featured the real historical character of Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General. But in that case I was helped by the fact that very little is known about Hopkins, and so I could create the character pretty much as I wanted him. With Edison, I felt a huge amount of pressure to get the real man down on the page as faithfully as I could.

Of course, the real Edison never experienced a night of supernatural terrors, as he does in HAUNTED, but I had to know enough about him as a character – his history, his family, his strengths and prejudices – to make the scene seem as genuine as I could, both for readers who had no clue about the historical Edison and for those who knew his life inside out. It was a terrifying challenge, but one I absolutely relished!

So what more can I tell you about HAUNTED? Well, here are a few teasers: we have a Circle of very unlikely and very ruthless necromancers (or ‘conjurers of the dead’); a haunted house once owned by a mass murderer; a deserted theme park in which a decidedly grisly ghost decides to manifest; a troubled boy with a secret so surprising it will (hopefully!) take your breath away; a hero who faces her grief and terror only to discover one devastating revelation after another; a school library like no other; an antique shop harbouring the most terrifying wonders the world has ever seen; a collector of bric-a-brac who will chill the very marrow of your bones; a mystery that goes to the heart of Emma Rhodes and blurs the line between the worlds of the living and the dead; and a nerve-shredding finale so spooky it made Michael Grant (of GONE fame) lose sleep!

But wait a minute…

Is that a phone ringing in the next room…? No, it’s OK, I’ll wait here.

I think it’s for you…

A note on the cover: this is the first EVER reveal of the HAUNTED cover, especially for the brilliant Book Zone. The artist is the very talented Rohan Eason, whose previous work includes The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. What we all wanted from this cover was a very stark fairy tale vibe to go with the gothic spookiness of the story. Lyrical black-and-white imagery contrasting with the red lettering fitted the bill perfectly. I love how the ghosts – or the ‘unmade’ as they are known in HAUNTED – swirl around to frame Emma as she ventures towards the Sparrow House.

A place where many dark secrets wait to be discovered…