Oh dear.

This book has a very nice cover.

I bought this book after reading a compilation of reviews about new SFF/Horror. I downloaded samples of four new books from that compilation. When I read each of the samples, I was surprised that they each launched the action with the opening of a door. Odd trend, I mused, buying this one.\

The sample was intriguing.

It starts with a young man who dislikes doors. His mother has recently died, and he honors her dying request by visiting a man he has never met at an address he has never been to before, in the alley of a neighborhood that he is unfamiliar with. At first, the door seems discrete, as if it does not want to be seen, and unpleasant, spongey and mildewed, as if to discourage knocking. But there is no doorbell or knocker, no Ring; he is at an impasse with the door. Then, as he makes up his mind to forget the whole thing and just go home, he notices a perfectly circular knot at eye level. He touches it and the door swings open.

He enters a dark, somewhat eerie, hallway, which he traverses to climb the stairs to the second floor, where he finds himself in pitch blackness, except for a line of light along the floor at the far end of the hall. That light turns out to be coming from beneath the door into a rather modern office, containing three office workers, with computers, arguing amongst themselves. He enters and introduces himself. They are discouraging until he mentions the name of the man his mother told him to find: Dr. Ribero.

It quickly turns out they knew his mother. They knew her very well. She used to work there.

And, in fact, Dr. Ribero is his father.

And the office is actually an “agency for the supernatural.”

A form of ghostbusters, if you please, only they trap ghosts in empty plastic water bottles instead of Ghost Traps.

He doesn’t believe them until they let one out, just to show him. Then he is so terrified that he is determined to leave and go home. However, he mentions something that he saw behind the ghost – a sort of door – and Dr. Ribero persuades him to stay, just for another day, just to see how unfrightening a real ghost could be. Just come out with us for a single case, he says.

That case reassures him; so they bring him on another case which terrifies the bejesus out of him and sends him scurrying for his safe home in Cambridge, which it turns out Dr. Ribero had purchased and given to his mother, in addition to an ongoing allowance for caring for their child and paying for his education through college.

But his safe home feels empty and boring now, and he finds himself drawn back to the agency, and the tentative relationships he has built there. An academic, he finds the onsite work nauseating (literally) but he finds the research stimulating. Perhaps he could be their research assistant?

I’m going to stop with the plot summary at this point.

This is Lucy Bank’s first novel and I’m trying really hard to be kind.

I had a few problems with this book. I kept falling asleep while reading it because the plot was a little thin and the setting so mundane – they only face two ghosts in the whole novel (plus the one they let out of the bottle and recapture easily).

I also found the characters a little – how do I put this – unappealing. I’ve had this problem before – it seems like some authors like to people their books with characters who, if you met them in real life, you’d avoid, as if the author wants to challenge you to like people who are unpleasant¹.

The main character says he is an academic researcher, but he mainly googles things and reads things off obsolete websites; and he is full of self-pitying monologues – at one point he can’t believe that a beautiful Swedish girl might like him, and I can’t believe it either. Dr. Ribero is a stock Argentinian with oiled hair and a waxed moustache who, in his younger days, slept with the main character’s mother while he was also engaged to – and on the verge of marrying – another member of his agency. His fiancée’s father had inherited the agency from his own father and his father before him and, with his daughter safely engaged, willed the agency to her fiancé, and died before finding out of Dr. Ribero’s betrayal of his daughter. The fiancee, while calling off the marriage, has stayed in the agency, clearly hating herself but doing nothing to regain control, and enabling Dr. Ribero at every turn. Another character is a spiteful pair of stilettos who has nothing good to say to or about anyone. There’s an overweight older medium, covered in dog hair; and the stock crass IT guy. I could never figure out what they saw in each other, what the main character sees in them, and why they would want to hang out together. Even their clients are off-putting.

If you found the premise of this book interesting, want a compelling plot, nuanced characters that you root for, believable dialog, and really creepy setting, read Lockwood & Co. instead.

So who should read this book? Writers who have finished a book and have been hesitating to send it out.

This is book one of a series.

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1. Agatha Raisin comes to mind. And there’s that other guy – I don’t have the book with me and only read it once – the British police officer who is corrupt… no, not that one… not that one either… this one is like Sergeant Troy, only he’s the main character of the book and solves the mysteries despite his bumbling corruption, and he was written back in the Golden Age of Mysteries. I only read one and he was so repulsive I couldn’t believe they had published more than one. ↩︎