The Babysitter Lives by Stephen Graham Jones

 

This is a kinda strange little horror novel, very much a Bad Place novel--there are ghosts galore, but they're being held by the house for ... reasons, I guess--Jones never explains any of the why, which is defensible enough since all of the characters basically seem to have come to be held by the house and found it more or less as it is, without reason or explanation. It does make for a kinda unsatisfying novel, though, since the rules of reality (in the context of the novel) feel as though they're always in a state of flux. There's clearly no escape for the titular baby sitter, even though she's arguably alive, and there's not much chance for several others, either--and there are apparently going to be ramifications on the "real world" outside the house (the world in the house is arguably supposed to be real, but it always feels too dreamlike to really buy as real). It's not as though Stephen Graham Jones suddenly forgot how to write a horror novel--the writing here is mostly good--it's just that this one doesn't work as well as much of his more recent stuff. Oh, well.