The story definitely kept me guessing and the surprises just never stopped. The book is told through journal entries, transcripts, and other documents which worked very well and gave the reader an idea of what each member of the team was thinking or feeling at any given moment. Once I started reading, I was not happy when it was time to set the book down and go to work because I could have easily read for hours. I really enjoyed this book! I love a good spooky story so the idea of a book written about a TV show out hunting ghosts sounded just like my thing. This is the first DiLouie novel I've read, but it won't be my last, if he can pump out brilliance like this. I know some are complaining about the epistolary format, but honestly, I actually quite enjoy that, so it worked really well for me. I can't think of any others that do it as well. This is one of those rare haunted house novels (along with the aforementioned Hell House, Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, and of course, King's The Shining) that both set up the promise, then actually deliver on it and do it well.

While I compare it to those other novels, I must point out that this is unlike any other novel I've ever read.

It starts as a decent haunted house story, with the weirdness of the hippie scientists from 1972 (and captured really well, by the way) but then slips into this far weirder and scarier thing. And that's actually a really good set of comparisons. Someone else says it's the cross of Hell House and House of Leaves, with a little bit of Event Horizon tossed in. The rest of this book is just unbelievably fantastic. When I got to the next event, that's when I realized that DiLouie was messing with us, giving us a false sense of security before he whacked us over the head. There's a bunch of very unsupernatural reasons that could have happened and it made me question how good the rest of this novel was actually going to be. It's trumpeted by the characters as 'solid proof' and I was over here thinking, nope, that's clown shoes, kids. I'll state one thing right up front.the first big 'event' (no spoilers) in the book made me really question whether I wanted to go on. Having not gotten to the two Fracassi books in my TBR pile yet, I'll go on record for now stating this is easily my favourite horror novel of the year (and yes, I'm quite aware that we're not even through February as yet).

Episode thirteen craig dilouie