THE HAUNTED is absolutely heartbreaking in its dissection familial relationships. Don’t be mistaken, this is a haunted house tale but it is also a study of the power and beauty of family and sacrifice. That is why the actual haunting seems so frightening. Little creates rich characters that the reader can relate to and when we see them tormented, it hurts just a little bit more. Little creates characters and worlds that are eerily similar to the places his readers call “home”, then he incorporates chilling elements spawned from the mundane to throw our precious lives into a tailspin.

The story is slightly flawed as certain plotlines are never fully hashed out and often end up going nowhere, making the middle of the novel slightly frustrating.

The fact that THE HAUNTED is so frightening makes it easy to forget about minor flaws. Little crafted an ancient evil that had me waking up at night, hearing things creaking about the house. The terror is cranked up at an agonizing pace until the reader is too frightened to keep reading but too engaged to put the book down. It leaves the reader with a special reading experience that when firing on all cylinders, Little does better than anyone in the genre.