Competent story about a man haunted by the stepfather of a girl he once dated. A girl who apparently killed herself, but that made so little sense once I began to think about it that her actual fate was not much of a surprise. One advantage here, I think, is that the story starts so quickly. In many novels about ghosts and haunting, there's often a fairly slow start, as small disturbing things begin to pile up and up, but here, once the ghost appears (and he does, early on) there's no let up. Which is to say I quite enjoyed the pacing, but I just couldn't warm that much to the characters.

Jude is sort of vaguely unpleasant, and from the moment the story started talking about the snuff film in his collection of weird shit I had no sympathy. Yes, he goes to town on a couple of child molesters in here, but given he's got a film of a girl being murdered, and has found it valuable enough (entertaining enough?) to keep, well. I'd have been more impressed if he'd made the connection between his own choice to exploit victims and those of the horrible people he went after, but the recurring device of the snuff film peters out with no resolution, as if both Jude and Hill forgot about it. To be honest, the most incredible thing about the whole thing was not the horrible ghost, but that Jude's girlfriend Marybeth stayed with him in the first place. I'm just not feeling the apparent love between them, so I couldn't really connect emotionally with the story. Apart from the dogs, of course.