The Coffin Path - Katherine Clements

** spoiler alert ** Well, this book is definitely crammed full of spookiness and dripping with atmosphere! You can see the dark moors, the swirling mists, the waterlogged peat bogs. You can almost hear the bleating of sheep, the mournful caw of the crows...

Clements does a great job of imbuing the entire story with a sense of unease which is at times quite unsettling. This is a traditional ghost story in my opinion, but done extremely well. I had no trouble picturing her characters or the setting they were in. It is all rather bleak and foreboding. Even the children are part of the haunting storyline. I confess to being a little confused by the ending, as it left me unsure what the haunting really was after all. Was it simply the house itself? Or the place where it was built? I get the impression that the ghostly sounds she hears from the unused bedroom - the 'thunk, shrrsh' is the sound Ellis's legs make at the end of the story, when she helps him to bed. As if it has all happened before, and that Mercy has been hearing the sound of her own haunting, so to speak. As if they are all caught in some deadly, eternal circle of life, death and then a sad and troubled afterlife until they do it all again. Perhaps I am wrong but that is how I understood it. Even the boy - Sam - shooting the man - Ellis - is a repetition of the past.

The twist regarding the relationship between Mercy and Ellis became more and more inevitable as the book went on, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. This is a very atmospheric, descriptive book; a take on the traditional ghost story, done very well. If you are after a book that you would rather not read when alone, or late at night, or up on the moors somewhere, then 'The Coffin Path' is for you.