Book review | Help for the Haunted: Family drama enhances suspense

By For The Columbus Dispatch  • 

The best scary stories unfold on the porous boundary between the supernatural and the ordinary.

The moving and elegantly constructed Help for the Haunted by John Searles places a tense family drama in the context of a series of exorcisms.

At the start of the novel, 10 months have passed since high-school freshman Sylvie Mason heard the gunshots that killed her parents in a deserted church in their small Maryland hometown.

Sylvie lives under the dubious guardianship of her unstable sister, Rose — four years her senior. Rose, beset by her own problems, thinks ice pops make a good dinner and potato chips a sound breakfast. She also isn’t interested in helping Sylvie replace the clothes she has outgrown or in dealing with the hearing loss she suffered because of the gunshots.

Sylvie’s parents — modeled after the couple that inspired the summer film The Conjuring — were amateur exorcists who stored “haunted” artifacts in their basement. Her father, a former dentist, enjoyed the celebrity of making speeches and being interviewed for a book; her shy, psychic mother preferred being left alone.

Before their deaths, their family was in turmoil: Rebellious Rose had just returned from a boarding school that was supposed to straighten her out, only to find her room occupied by Abigail, a teenager whose father thought she was suffering from demonic possession.

The novel, set in the late 1980s, follows Sylvie, long the “good girl” of her family, as she tries to figure out who killed her parents. The novel moves between her memories of the past and her experiences in the present.

Sylvie is an engaging narrator, fearful and observant, only gradually realizing that some of her assumptions about her family and community might be flawed.

The other characters in the novel, seen through Sylvie’s suspicious eyes, all reveal potentially sinister motives. Sylvie’s mysterious uncle, her distracted counselor, Rose’s ex-boyfriend, and the unknown woman who leaves casseroles at the door of the family house all become suspects.

Particularly powerful is the complicated relationship between Sylvie and Rose, strained almost to the breaking point by the stresses of life with their parents and the people their parents try to help.

Searles craftily uses the conventions of the horror novel to cast light on the troubled dynamics at work inside a family, as well as the pressures from the outside world. His novel is both a suspenseful page turner and a provocative look at what it means to be haunted.