This was a weird combination of a gangster novel and an old-fashioned English ghost story. And it works, but it doesn’t really start working until the appearance of a dour, frightening hitman named Raghead (which is another nickname for the Bogeyman, by the way). He is sent to whack the main character, a midlist horror writer who was commissioned to ghost-write the autobiography of the area’s most notorious mobster and instead pissed him off. But the writer and the hitman turn out to be childhood friends who bonded over M.R. James stories, so Raghead spares him and hides him in the spooky haunted house where he lives. That’s when the story starts getting very strange, and also much more interesting. But beware: this novel is also a rip-roaring horror tale, and therefore not intended for the squeamish.