I am usually a great fan of Phil Rickman's work, and not just the Merrily Watkins series, but I found this one harder to get into. I didn't find most of the main characters at all sympathetic, and it took a while for the story to fully wind into gear. One for the fans of darker, bleaker supernatural mysteries. ( )

As a reader of Phil Rickman's Merrily Watkins series, I've come to admire him for his ability to create a true sense of unease, of chills down the spine, of things just glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. He does this, yet keeps the story grounded in the real world. He does that again in Night After Night.

As Grayle Underhill begins her investigation into the 500-year-old Knap Hall, Rickman was succeeding brilliantly at making me very uneasy about the ancient Tudor farmhouse. In fact, I was reminded of one of my favorite novels, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. I couldn't wait for all those celebrities to be locked inside that house-- and this is as close as I'll ever come to liking reality TV!

Unhappily for me, I found my sense of unease to abate quickly. The story goes into quite some detail about choosing the celebrities and preparing for filming, which I did find interesting, but all that detail took away from the unsavory history of Knap Hall and the feeling that unspeakable things were about to happen.

Instead of things going bump in the night as I'd hoped, the story centered on all the secrets of the celebrity inhabitants. True to Rickman's usual style, the "scary stuff" was all rooted in the real world, but without that carryover of unease and dread to buoy the story, I felt a little bit let down. Night After Night is still an engrossing read, but the wow factor was missing for me. ( )

There's no such thing as a lousy Phil Rickman book, so most of his works start out at four stars with me on here. But as good as Rickman is at the Merrily Watkins supernatural mysteries, I've always believed that where he really shines is in the stand-alone horror novels like December. Like December, Night After Night is a very modern collision of pop culture and ancient secrets, a collision that Rickman handles flawlessly and with a characteristic subtlety that makes the creeping dread hard to walk away from even to get some sleep. Outstanding ghost story that blends a very British restraint with an almost American horror sensibility. A must-read for fans of the genre. ( )