Kirkus Reviews beat us to the best description of Alexandra Sokoloff’s THE HARROWING, when it described her debut as “POLTERGEIST meets THE BREAKFAST CLUB.” Add a handful of THE EXORCIST into the mix, and you’ve got a nifty novel that somehow doesn’t read like every other horror paperback on the shelves.

THE HARROWING takes place at Baird College as Thanksgiving break begins. Poor, wallflowery Robin Stone is staying behind in the dorms, not wishing to go home to her perpetually drunk mother. Her loneliness soon gives way to a suicidal depression. She thinks she’s alone in the building; she’s not.

As she ventures into the lounge with whisky in one hand and Valium in the other, Robin is startled to find a studious boy named Martin drowned in a book and a musician type named Cain reading Rolling Stone. They’re soon joined by the punkish Lisa and the handsome jock Patrick, who happens to be the boyfriend of Robin’s sorority-bitch roomie Waverly.

When the electricity goes out – taking the football game on TV along with it – the group makes do with a Ouija board they find. Despite their disbelief, it works; they contact a spirit who calls himself Zachary. It’s not until a little later that Robin discovers that was the name of a student who died in that very dorm back in 1920. Zachary is a pretty innocent spirit at first, moving furniture out of place. But soon he graduates to murder and possession.

Although 300 pages, THE HARROWING moves just as speedily as the planchette does underneath our coeds’ fingers across the Ouija board. Sokoloff’s story almost could be a play, confined mostly to one setting with few characters other than the core five, but you’ll wish it were a movie.

Again, it reads like something fresh, even though possession stories are far from that definition. It’s not until the final sixth that the plot isn’t sure what to do with itself, or at least knows what to do but isn’t as interesting as all before it. Regardless, this is an effectively chilling ghost story I can recommend for a long winter night, heralding Sokoloff as a rising new voice in horror. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.