Thursday Thoughts: Book Recommendation of Into The Grey by Celine Kiernan

(Thanks to the publishers for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for a considering it for a recommendation.)

After a fire at the house of teen boys Pat and Dom, something strange happens to the brothers. One day, Pat wakes and sees a strange little goblin boy talking to Dom. When Dom forgets about this, Pat has to try to deal with the issue and save his beloved twin's life before he's lost to the Grey.

This one took me ages to read because for weeks, the only reading time I had was late at night, and it's that little bit too chilling for me to be particularly comfortable reading it just before going to sleep! The haunting in this book is truly scary, and it's unpredictability makes it more worrying to read.

It's no surprise to those of us who've read Celine Kiernan's Moorehawke trilogy - up there with Curtis Jobling's Wereworld series and Daniel Abraham's The Dagger And The Coin books as the best fantasy of the last decade for me - that the relationships between the characters, particularly Dom and Pat, are so brilliantly portrayed and form the heart of the book. What's also interesting, though, is that there's no real villain here. The ghost haunting Dom is just as lost as Pat is, and for all Pat's frustration at him, the problem can't be dealt with unless they can start to empathise with each other.

Additionally, the setting of Ireland in the 1970s and flashbacks to the 1910s is captured well.