Keeping all the lights on

A word of advice: Don't finish this book when you're home alone at night. Justin Evans' A Good and Happy Child could safely be called a psychological thriller, though with a hefty dose of the supernatural thrown in. I can't decide which side of the story was scarier; both were tremendously unnerving. The novel is a page-turner in the best sense -- prose that draws the reader in quickly and holds that momentum until the very end. On his website, Evans says it took him six years to write the book; the writing definitely shows a meticulous attention to even the smallest details (a nice change from the sea of haphazardly edited books out there lately). That intensity adds up to an impressive and satisfyingly unsettling book.

And I'm still not willing to turn off the lights quite yet.