Three years after losing their youngest son to a brain aneurysm, the Kellar family – David, Jenna and son Miles – move to a new home, or new to them, at least. It’s the house left behind by a father Jenna never knew, and the fresh surroundings seem to do the family good in the healing department. Until the ghosts of several kids keep showing up and rip those wounds wide open, in Ray Garton’s THE LOVELIEST DEAD.

The hauntings first show themselves in the form of a few children playing on the swingset in their backyard in the dead of night. Then there’s the repeated sound of Brahms’ “Lullaby” emanating through the walls. And, while Miles attempts to fall asleep, the form of a fat cowboy emerging from his floor. At a loss for what to do, Jenna consults some psychics in the area, one of whom visits with a Ouija board and only serves to rile up the spirits further. Another doesn’t like the presence he senses and tells her, “You’ve got somethin’ bad in this house, Mrs. Kellar, somethin’ … sick. And it don’t like bein’ disturbed.”

That’s an understatement, as events come to a head, complicated by the arrival of an old married couple notorious for paranormal investigations (you may recognize them as being very thinly veiled representations of real-life “demonologists” Ed and Lorraine Warren, as seen on THE AMITYVILLE HORROR documentaries from The History Channel) and a defrocked priest. Ironically, the only person who can help the Kellars – Lily, a rotund psychic from a neighboring town who experiences intense visions accompanied by the smell of bananas – is flatly refused by them. “I’m so angry right now, I could chew nails and shit battleships,” Lily says, but vows to help anyway, because she senses Something Very Bad is about to happen.

Garton shows a sure hand in stringing readers along, delivering scenes to elicit goosebumps at just the right moments. One contention, however: I’ve read a lot of novels lately in which people of faith are considered absolute nutballs. Garton obviously has a knock against religion, and that’s fine by me, but for all religious characters to be portrayed as a mixture of mentally ill, fraudulent and harboring murderous and/or pedophiliac tendencies is not so much offensive as it is just lazy. “Christian” is, evidently, the new stereotype of choice in genre literature.

Rant over. I’m a sucker for haunted house stories, and Garton’s – mixing AMITYVILLE, POLTERGEIST and Jack Ketchum’s THE GIRL NEXT DOOR – is a good one. It hooks from the start, lags a bit in a couple of chapters toward the middle and comes back with a vengenance for the end. –Rod Lott

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