On the whole, The Ghost Hunters works fairly well, though there are odd lapses. There’s a touch of Richard Matheson’s Hell House here, with its attempts to science-ify the supernatural, and at the same time a nicely old-fashioned M R James feel to a tale of academic research, strange relics and strange happenings. To add to this apparent realism, there’s an engaging, if tricky, balance throughout the book between the scientific rational and the supernatural irrational. Neil does explain at the end what is ‘real’ and what is fiction at the end of the book for readers still not sure. There are references to real newspapers, signed documents and ephemera of the time, which give what could be seen as a far-fetched tale a semblance of authenticity. To this Neil has mixed in real people (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a real-life believer in spiritualism, Daily Mirror newspaper reporter Vernon Wall) with the fictional. Harry Price was a real person, as was his reputation. I recognise many of the details here, even though I first read of them thirty-odd years ago. When I was a youngster and reading as much as I could about haunted houses, Borley was one of my favourites. I enjoyed this a lot, and most of all its mixing of reality with fiction. What happens when he and Sarah go to Borley to investigate and what happens afterwards is what takes up most of the rest of the book.

Harry sees it as an attempt to refute the ideas of ghosts once and for all. Soon after taking on the position, Sarah finds herself and Harry involved in the case of Borley Rectory, a Victorian mansion reputedly ‘the most haunted house in England’. Sarah finds herself increasingly involved in such activities as well as being attracted to the charismatic, yet odd, Price.

Harry seems determined to show the world that most ‘mediums’ are charlatans and fakers and has set up a science laboratory in London to test them. Sarah is a young twenty-something, keen to show the world what she can do and also further science by assisting Mr Price in his exploration of the supernatural. It is the story of Sarah Gray, who in this fiction in 1926 unexpectedly found herself taking on the appointment of assistant to Harry Price, at the time Britain’s most famous ‘ghost-hunter’. The Ghost Hunters’ first main fiction is that it is a manuscript, supposedly found in 1977, left in a long-forgotten (by most) research library as part of a job lot, relics of an earlier age. This year’s read was not what I was expecting to read. Regular visitors to these reviews at SFFWorld will know that I have a lot of fun choosing what to read at Hallowe’en each year, whether it be something old or something new.

The Ghost Hunters by Neil Spring