This is a Gothic ghost story set on the Yorkshire moors of the late 1600s, and I wanted to like it better than I did. I did enjoy reading it, and I will say that the prose is very accomplished and easy to read: I gobbled down the book in two sittings. The grim, bleak atmosphere was also exceptionally well done, as the evil living up on the moors seeps its way into Scarcross Hall and the family who lives there. That evil is centred around a group of standing stones, some disappearing coins, and a series of historical tragedies that make it clear to the local community that the Hall is pretty much inescapably cursed. The problem is - and this is dropping the rating half a star for me - the link between this historical evil and current events is thin. Really, ambiguously thin, and the book sells itself as a ghost story, but I'm never exactly sure who the ghost is supposed to be, or even if it's a ghost at all, instead of a generally random demonic presence. There's no sense of character to the ghost, as there is in, for example, The Woman in Black. It's so un-anchored to the rest of the text that any sense of personality or motivation for the so-called haunting is just entirely absent.

All of which leads me to the other issue, which drops the second half-star. This is a horror story, and I wasn't scared in the slightest. I read the bulk of this book in bed, late at night, and there wasn't even a single tingle of fear. There was admiration for the prose and the setting - and really, those things are four star quality, both - but I read horror stories because I want to be creeped out by them... and here, I just wasn't.