I enjoyed this, but it's very oddly structured and in a way that does it no favours, I think. Gad's Hall starts out as a typical haunted house story. Jill and her husband are buying a house, and look! Here's one, at a ridiculously low price, and it seems far too good to be true. Jill's mother in law senses terrible things in the locked attic, but no-one pays any attention. Two of the three kids are oblivious, but the little girl, disturbed by bumps in the night, goes to stay with granny for a while.

Typical haunted house story, you think, albeit a very mild sort of haunting. And then it stops, because about a quarter of the way through the book jumps backwards in time, moving the action back several generations, to tell the story of why the attic was locked in the first place. There's a very mild sense of underlying demonic activity, but when I say very mild I mean very. I was in two minds whether or not to shelve this as horror it was so mild. It's more a typical historical novel, full of family problems, with the very barest of supernatural tinges. And the story never, ever, gets back to Jill. It just ends.

I understand there's a sequel, called The Haunting of Gad's Hall, which from the sound of it is actual haunting and actual horror, unlike the little tinges of it here. I suspect this volume seems so badly structured because the two books are meant to be read as one, but still. Individual volumes should be able to stand alone, and this is horribly lopsided.