When Elliot and his brother, Ben, move into the old and crumbling Glebe House they don't expect to find themselves sharing it with ghosts. But soon sinister events are unfolding... An old diary reveals glimpses of the mansion's past - and of a terrible tragedy. A mysterious woman talks to the dead. And evil lurks in the East Wing - a hideous labyrinth of passageways devised by a truly twisted mind. Can Elliot and his family escape the clutches of Glebe House? Or will they be trapped in the maze of corridors, forever hunted by the dead?
If you turn this book over you will see, in garish yellow capitals, the words 'NOT FOR YOUNGER READERS. If you then turn the book back, open it and read the first page you'll understand the warning. This is horror of the imagination. The opening sequence, with 16 year old Elliot lying in bed and listening to the approaching ghostly footsteps might sound a bit corny, but it's handled with a chilling touch. For a start, there are no jangly chains or eerie cries. The ghost that wakes Elliot was a young girl in life and the thumping that accompanies her is the head of the doll that she drags behind her. And for my money, if that isn't a pretty scary starting point I don't know what is.
The Hunting Ground of the title is an area of land close to Glebe House where a previous owner liked to chase his victims and that sense of chase permeates every page of this book. McNish whisks the reader along at a breath-taking pace, dropping clues for the protagonist and reader alike and never giving either of us time to really digest what we've learnt before moving onto the next.
This technique makes for a very quick read. You finish one chapter and have to move onto the next in the hope that the answer to the problem raised in that last chapter will be answered in the next, and so on. This is fun and exciting, and works perfectly for the first two thirds of the book. But I had a strong sense that the final act needed something different. All the story elements come together in the last third. The story twists and turns as fast as Elliot chases through the East Wing's corridors, and then, suddenly, things start to happen which are entirely new and seemed, to me, to belong in a different book entirely. I can't reveal the details without spoiling the story, but a new set of paranormal rules are introduced in that final act which haven't been prefigured in any way in the earlier action and without which the denouement cannot occur.
Now maybe, if the action hadn't flown as quickly as the metaphysics, I might have not been bothered by this. As it was, the nice little twist that brings the story to a close got lost while I tried to get my head around what had actually happened. And that meant that the end felt a bit like one of those 'with a bound he was free' things, which is a shame because the rest of the book is very good indeed.
So now I think, maybe, you need to read at least the last third of this book a bit more slowly, let the weird metaphysical stuff at the end sink in. Then the power of the twist will hit you and you will put it down feeling fully satisfied.
And as to that warning on the back. I agree. Horror of the gory kind is fine for younger readers. They love it. But there really isn't any gore to talk of here. Well, not described anyway. Instead there is plenty of opportunity to imagine all manner of ghastly ways to die, be maimed, tortured and generally put through pain. And it's all so seductively written that you don't really notice how much you are imagining all those nasty things until you put the book down.
And that, frankly, is enough to give anybody bad dreams.
The lovely people at Orion Books sent me a review copy. If you want one of your own please click the link below and Amazon will send a contribution to the maintenance of this blog.
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