In the Shadow of Spindrift House

Mira Grant

★★★★☆

Imagine the Scooby-Doo gang encountering a Lovecraftian horror in Hill House. They manage about as well as you might expect – which is to say, not very well at all.

It’s an interesting mashup of tropes. The teenage detectives are used to traveling around, busting “supernatural” frauds, though they have more serious issues. (The stoner who loves dogs also has severe anxiety, for instance, which is why he avoids people and self-medicates.) And they’re just aging out of the demographic when one of them convinces the rest to take on one more case before the band breaks up.

Naturally it’s a creepy old haunted house on a cliff above a small, dying coastal New England town that’s slowly being eaten away by the sea. And the families disputing ownership of the house both have old claims, and they all seem just a bit off somehow…

You know from the start that they’re not all coming back from that last case before retirement as everything falls apart (or falls into place, depending on perspective). It’s not a question of if so much as how…and how badly.